LAVI: A Location Aware Virtual Infrastructure for VANETs

Without requiring pre-fixed infrastructure, Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs) allow drivers to exchange information and access variant services in real-time manner. While achieving significant flexibility and convenience, dynamic network topology is also the source of challenges that invalidate most of well-designed protocols. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel scheme called Location Aware Virtual Infrastructure (LAVI). The fundamental rationale of the LAVI scheme is based on an observation: although each individual vehicle will not stay at a location for an extended period of time, statistically there are some vehicles available as long as the density of vehicles is reasonably high. LAVI creates a virtually stable infrastructure layer on top of the dynamic physical topology. Through extensive experimental study, we have verified the effectiveness of our LAVI scheme.