A novel location service for urban vehicular ad hoc networks

Position-based routing attracts more consideration in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) for its efficiency and scalability. To enable the geographic forwarding a vehicle must be able to discover the position of the destination node typically depending on the location service. Considering the characteristics of city scenario, we proposed a scalable and effective location service called RSLS based on responsible sections (RS) which are intersections with traffic lights or bus stops. Vehicles only in RS act as location servers to store the latest position of vehicles and provide location query service. Using distributed hash-based RS selection algorithm a vehicle can easily determine its corresponding RSes. Simulations were done with realistic traffic pattern and the results show that RSLS achieves higher query success rate and better scalability than two well-known location services.