Location service implementation in vehicular networks by nodes clustering in urban environments

Position based protocols, such as routing protocols, require a location service to find the position of destination nodes. In other words, a source node requests the location of the destination from the location service, and then the service starts to search for the destination node and returns its location to the source node. In this paper, a Cluster Based Location Service (CBLS) for Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETS) is proposed. CBLS divides the vehicles into clusters according to their speed, distance and neighboring parameters. A node in each cluster, cluster head, collects the other nodes position information and passes it to a main server in a hierarchical manner. In the proposed service, instead of fixed antennas, the vehicles antennas are used, so the services scalability and efficiency grow and capital cost decreases. The performance evaluation of the proposed service shows it outperforms the traditional (without clustering) hierarchical location services in terms of query delay and success rate.