A beaconing-based roadside services discovery protocol for vehicular ad hocnetworks

Recently, research on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has gained momentum all over the world. These emerging networks promise to make our driving experience more efficient, safer, comfortable, and enjoyable. VANETs have the potential to support a wide range of interesting applications. One such promising application area is the discovery of roadside services on the highways. Drivers need an efficient way to find these services during their journeys. However, due to the unique features of VANETs, the design and implementation of such applications is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an application layer beaconing-based roadside services discovery protocol (RSDP). The RSDP is a lightweight, beacon-based protocol, which uses store-carry-and-response technique and opportunistic vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Our solution is efficient for business owners, as the vehicles move from one place to another to carry service advertisements and opportunistically forward them to other vehicles upon request. Our system architecture is fully based on the VANET standard protocols stack. We performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of RSDP in a multilane highway scenario. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution in terms of services discovery.