Performance Evaluation of Location-Based Service Discovery Protocols for Vehicular Networks

A considerable number of Vehicular Network (VN) applications have been developed recently. These applications range from security and safety to traffic information and service location. However, several research challenges remain open concerning efficient service discovery in large scale VNs. Most of the existing service discovery strategies present high overhead and poor performance when applied to VNs. Furthermore, existing context-aware and location-based service discovery protocols are either designed without considering the particularities of VNs or are not scalable with the increase of network density and number of requests. In this paper, we present novel context-aware and location-based service discovery protocols (Election-Based LocVSDP and Naive LocVSDP) that offer a scalable framework for the discovery of time-sensitive and location based services in large scale VNs. We conduct a concrete set of simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our techniques and compare the results with an existing location-based discovery protocol (VITP). Simulation results indicate that our techniques outperform the VITP protocol in terms of success rate, average response time and bandwidth usage. In essence, both LocVSDP protocols show a gain of 20 percent in terms of success rate, use at least 90 percent less bandwidth than VITP and their average response time is at least 10 percent lower than VITP for successful query transactions.