Fireworks: an intelligent location discovery algorithm for vehicular ad hoc networks

Searching for and locating a certain destination in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) are fundamental issues to ensure routing and data dissemination under high mobility and lack of fixed infrastructure. However, naive-flooding searching is too expensive and takes a considerable amount of valuable bandwidth in the network. To overcome this, GPS information of the vehicles can be exploited, which can aid searching and routing in VANETs. In this paper, we present a novel position-based searching algorithm—called Fireworks—that can be used as a location discovery algorithm in VANETs. The proposed scheme is purely reactive and has a limited usage of beacons. Fireworks algorithm provides the position of the destination vehicle without having a Location Information System infrastructure or a proactive mechanism. We show that the method is efficient and reliable while greatly reducing the searching overhead. The simulations show that the algorithm covers as many nodes as naive-flooding with less than one-fifth of the broadcast messages and with less than one-third of the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). It also performs better than Acknowledgement-Based Broadcast Protocol (ABSM) in terms of total number of broadcast messages, node coverage speed and query success rate.