ZGLS: a novel flat quorum-based and reliable location management protocol for VANETs

In location management services, a destination advertises its position attributes to a set of vehicles called location servers while, a source obtains these attributes from such location servers to track destination. The location management techniques in VANET have been categorized into flooding-based, flat hashing-based, hierarchical hashing-based and hierarchical quorum-based techniques. In flooding-based location service, destination information is flooded to the entire network which results into high congestion, low throughput and non-scalable network. In flat hashing, a global hash function is applied to compute location servers of each destination which results into higher delay, drop and signaling overhead in large VANETs. In hierarchical hashing, global hash function computes location servers of destination in hierarchical order. It therefore suffers from handover signaling between servers, high load on the top hierarchy and location query delay when source and destination are apart. In hierarchical quorum-based, location servers are identified cluster-wise and therefore it also suffers from the problems similar to hierarchical techniques. To overcome these problems, ZoomOut Geographic Location Service (ZGLS) protocol is proposed which introduces flat quorum-based location management service. In contrast to the aforementioned techniques, the novelty of ZGLS lies in the fact that it has shifted the location server role from hashing-based or clustering-based geographic areas to few 1-hop neighbours, called relatives. The proposed protocol creates a chain of relatives to provide positioning and tracking service. To evaluate signalling overhead, timeliness and the reliability of update and query packets, ZGLS is compared with RLSMP and HRHLS through ns-2 simulations. The results reveal that ZGLS stands out as a better choice for large-scale sparse and dense VANETs.