Mobility-Assisted Location Management for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are gaining importance for inter-vehicle communication, because they allow for the local communication between vehicles without any infrastructure, configuration effort, and without the expensive cellular networks. As geographic routing can be used to achieve efficient data delivery in VANETs, how to provide location management service in VANETs to facilitate geographic routing remains a fundamental issue. In this paper we will present a novel location management protocol, call MALM, to provide location service to vehicles in VANETs. In MALM, a vehicle calculates the current location of other vehicles by using Kalman filtering based on the historical location information of other nodes. Theoretical analysis is provided to show that MALM is able to achieve high location information availability in the network. We evaluate the performance of MALM via extensive simulations. The simulation results show that MALM works efficiently in VANETs.