Reactive service location in IEEE WAVE

The IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) family of standards is the leading worldwide standardisation effort in terms of Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). WAVE aims at defining a common set of requirements and functionalities, in order to enable intercommunication and interoperability between nodes in a Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET). Despite the concept of service as an abstraction of a shared resource or capability is central to WAVE and that the architecture it outlines spans the complete protocol stack, the standards, per se, do not provide all of the flexibility required by an otherwise heterogeneous, dynamic and distributed system built around the service abstraction. This paper extends that flexibility by describing a reactive location protocol based on existing WAVE elements, conceived in the wider context of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for VANET. The protocol complements the proactive location scheme that is already part of WAVE and exemplifies how complex objectives can be attained from the basic set of features in a WAVE-compliant node.