A New Selection Metric for Backup Group Creation in Inter-Vehicular Networks

Reliable service provisioning in car-to-car networks is challenging because the environment is very dynamic and network topologies are changing rapidly, hence making communication unreliable. For service-level fault-tolerance, the service needs to be replicated onto several vehicles. For state-full services with dynamically changing state, a careful choice of the replica servers is necessary due to the dynamically changing properties of the communication paths between them. This paper proposes and analyzes a heuristic metric called geo-cost that aids the selection of replica candidates based on information about speed and direction of the cars. The analysis in simulation experiments shows that the proposed heuristic is performing equally well when compared to an existing approach based on a snapshot measurement of network delays. The difference between the existing metric and geo-cost is the feasibility of geo-cost compared to network delays that are often hard to determine.