Joint routing and location-based service in VANETs

• The paper presents a large study of existing location services and routing protocols.
• The study presents an original combination between routing and location services.
• The approach is efficient since it reduces the overhead and improves performances.
• A theoretical analysis on the complexity of the location request cost is provided (82 characters).
• A simulation shows that our mechanism improves the location and routing efficiency.

Geographic routing protocols use location information when they need to route packets. In the meantime, location information are maintained by location-based services provided by network nodes in a distributed manner. Routing and location services are very related but are used separately. Therefore, the overhead of the location-based service is not considered when we evaluate the geographic routing overhead. Our aim is to combine routing protocols with location-based services in order to reduce communication establishment latency and routing overhead.Our main contribution is to reduce the location overhead. Thus, we propose two combinations: (1) a geographic routing protocol with GLS called Hybrid Routing and Grid Location Service (HRGLS) and (2) a geographic routing protocol with HLS denoted Hybrid Routing and Hierarchical Location Service (HRHLS), where instead of launching an exact position request, we send the packet to the old destination position and when the packet is approaching the former position, we request the exact one.The complexity of the location query cost in both proposed schemes is O(logN)O(logN), while it is O(N) in the case of HLS and GLS. Simulation results also confirm the complexity analysis and show promising results in terms of latency, packet delivery ratio and control message overhead.