Vehicle location service scheme based on road map in Vehicular Sensor Networks

Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) are merging for supporting communications between roadside sensor nodes and vehicles on for notifying environment events on roads to drivers and passengers. Geographic routing has been considered as an efficient and scalable approach to send sensing data from sensor nodes to vehicles. Fundamentally, geographic routing requires sensor nodes to be aware of the location information of vehicles. Since sensor nodes are deployed around roads and vehicles move on the roads, this field property of VSNs brings about a challenging issue to provide location service of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a quorum-based location service scheme to provide sensor nodes with the location information of vehicles in VSNs. For providing the location service, the proposed scheme exploits a crossing point between a quadrangular path quorum of a location update and a line path quorum of a location query by using the road map information. Then, the proposed scheme is extended to accommodate several considerations such as voids, multiple vehicles and sources, and energy depletion. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is analyzed and validated by extensive numerical and simulation results.