Location-Based Message Aggregation in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks, vehicles cooperate in receiving and delivering messages to each other in ad hoc manner without the need for an expensive fixed infrastructure. Nevertheless, inter-vehicle communications require solving the problem of message routing, where the location of the destination node is unknown due to node mobility and lack of adequate infrastructure. Hence, the problem of finding the location of the destination node (node localization) becomes very complex. One of the most recent solution approaches for node localization in VANET is to use location service management protocols. However, major impediments in leveraging such promising solutions include the large volume of signaling overhead which results from the increase in the number of vehicles and/or the non-local communication traffic in the network. In this paper, a region-based location service management protocol (RLSMP) is proposed. This protocol is a self-organizing framework, which uses message aggregation enhanced by geographical clustering to minimize the volume of the signaling overhead. RLSMP is the first protocol that uses message aggregation in querying, and promises scalability, locality awareness, minimum signaling overhead and maximum channel utilization.