An Efficient Geo-aware Peer-to-Peer Resource Discovery and Sharing Scheme in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicles may move at high speed in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) and the network topology changes arbitrarily as the nodes move. Vehicles may not find suitable resources because sharing information could quickly become obsolete or irrelevant resources. This paper proposes an efficient geo-aware Peer-to-Peer (P2P) search mechanism to enable resource discovery and sharing in VANETs. We propose discovery and sharing schemes based on the virtual backbone architecture, and then limit the data exchanging region to reduce unnecessary message transmissions. Because the resource node changes very fast, the coordinator must be set to maintain the local node of geographic information in the network. In this scheme, coordinators are established to store information and manage local resource information. In order to ensure dissemination performance, it must guarantee that vehicles possess enough resource pieces to allow efficient bartering. Furthermore, three kinds of piece selection mechanisms, including Nearest-First, Rarest-First, and In-Order are proposed to download resource pieces from other vehicles and to improve the dissemination efficiency. Experiment results demonstrate that our searching and sharing schemes are efficient and outperforms other schemes in terms of satisfactory ratio and download time.