Context-aware and location-based service discovery protocol for Vehicular Networks: Proof of correctness

Recent advances in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the growing number of applications in Vehicular Networks (VN) have attracted many researchers. Applications in Vehicular Networks comprise but are not limited to safety applications and convenience applications. Deploying Vehicular Networks widely cannot be accomplished without overcoming the existing research challenges in such networks. Service discovery is one of the main challenges in Vehicular Networks which are characterized by their large scale and high mobility. Existing service discovery techniques for ad hoc networks cannot be applied directly to Vehicular Networks scenarios due to their poor performance and decreased efficiency in Vehicular Networks. In this paper, we present our location-based service discovery protocol for Vehicular Networks (LocVSDP). Our protocol permits the discovery of location-aware and time-sensitive services in Vehicular Networks. Moreover, our LocVSDP protocol improves service discovery efficiency by integrating service information into the network layer and using diverse channels. In our protocol, we present our efficient mechanism that permits to service requesters to find service providers and their routing information simultaneously, which results in overall bandwidth savings. We make use of diverse channels for the exchange of discovery and routing packets, which decreases the congestion on single channels and improves the delay of service discovery. Then, we present our efficient location-based request propagation and an efficient computation of the service reply, based on the specified location of the requested service in the drivers request. We discuss the implementation of our protocol and present its proof of correctness.