A hybrid cooperative service discovery scheme for mobile services in VANET

Discovering and accessing services while on the road is an important component in the architecture of future vehicular ad hoc networks, and for a successful deployment of services. Several studies have focused on the design and development of new routing and dissemination techniques that allow vehicles to communicate with each other and with road side units. However, detecting and reaching available services in a vehicular network remains problematic due to the amount of wireless traffic generated when service queries or advertisements are flooded across the network. In this paper, we propose a cooperative hybrid service discovery scheme for discovering services provided by mobile vehicles. This scheme is achieved through cooperating vehicles using store-and-forward approach and by sharing collected service information. We also propose to study the performance of the scheme by varying its degree of reactiveness and proactiveness. It is integrated with a caching mechanism which substantially improves the performance of the service discovery in terms of reduction of the traffic generated, and minimization of the response time while increasing the discovery success rate.