Location service management protocol for vehicular ad hoc network urban environment

Location based service is used in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) to locate a node’s position before the start of any communica- tion. The existing location services proposed for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) suffer from low scalability in VANET environments. Protocols proposed for VANET do not consider load balance on location servers, and do not consider realistic information for selecting location servers which affect the protocols efficiency. This paper proposes a Quorum- Based Location Service Management Protocol (QLSP) which is designed for urban area topology utilizing specific node information such as the distance to intersection centre point, and speed in selecting main loca- tion server. Formation of quorum location servers is achieved by the main location server through the nomination of other nodes located at the in- tersection based on their direction of movement. QLSP shows excellent performance in reducing overhead of control packets, provides a high de- livery ratio of packets to destination, and reduces the end-to-end delay of routing packets. The performance of the protocol is then compared to other existing location service protocols.