Geographic Location and Routing in Vehicular
Networks
André Camões
Instituto Superior Técnico - Universidade de Lisboa
Abstract—Given the constant development in Vehicular Net-
works, this area has gained increasingly maturity, with new
proposals to address the new challenges brought by this type of
networks, in particular questions concerning about routing pro-
cesses, different vehicular environments and high node mobility
problematic. Associated with this development is the ever growing
commitment by automobile manufacturers to equip their vehicles
with communication units, in addition to the already common
widespread GPS devices. It is of interest, then, to develop efforts
towards the making of networks that take full advantage of the
features present in this vehicular environment. In this work will
be implemented a location service, that takes advantage of the
physical infrastructure on the roads and evaluate its feasability
comparing with another location service, used in tradicional
mobile ad-hoc networks.
Keywords—Vehicular Networks, Location Service, Position-
based Routing, Vehicle Prediction
I. I NTRODUCTION
The evolution in communication systems lead to an emer-
gent research area - Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) -
where the major goal is to improve road safety by extending
the communication range and disseminate relevant information
to remote areas. A VANET may be considered a sub-set of
Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), with specific charac-
teristics associated with node properties, road environment and
vehicle’s dynamics. Such networks also has a very specific
purpose as intended better experience of drivers and passengers
through the provision of vehicle to vehicle communications
(V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I).
This new area lead to the development of specific appli-
cations, leveraging the low cost of wireless technology that
is widespread. Typically these applications aim to increase
road safety and transportation efficiency, as well as to reduce
the impact of transportation on the environment [1]. These
features enable new opportunities that are financially exploited
by investors which see in this area a great source of profit and
profitability of its infrastructure. It is notorious that effort by
consortia which have been created to stimulate the growth of
this area, including the automotive industry, the road operators,
tolling agencies and other service providers [2].
In spite of the broad range of services that might be offered
by VANETs, the specific requirements of the environment
create significant challenges that had been addressed by the
research community. One of these challenges is related with
routing: the difficulties of coping with the network dynamics,
where a wide variable density of nodes, moving at very
different speeds and having different mobility patterns [3]
introduces additional difficulties in the process of finding a
route to a destination or locating a node.
A wide variety of routing protocols have been proposed
either topology or position-based, as surveys in [4], [5].
When comparing both approaches, several performance studies
have shown that position-based routing are more adequate for
VANETs than other solutions [6]. Nevertheless, usually the
comparisons rely on the use of an omniscient location service
[7], hiding the overhead related with the discovery of the
destination node’s location.
Unlike topology-based routing, position-based relies on the
use of a location service to find the position of the destination
node. Different location services have been proposed in the
literature, using basically two main approaches: flooding or
rendezvous based, as surveyed in [8]. These approaches use
different strategies to locate the nodes, but none of them take
into account the context. We claim that a simpler and efficient
location-service can be designed, if the characteristics of the
physical infra-structure is taken into account. In this paper we
propose a new location service, the Simple Location Service
(SILOS), fully aware of the vehicular environment that can
take advantage of this knowledge to offer a better performance.
In order to assess if position-based routing outperforms
topology-based we compare our solution, coupled with the
most well-known position-based protocol, the Greedy Perime-
ter Stateless Routing (GPSR) with a typical topology-based
protocol.
In the next section, we describe most relevant works that
lead to our proposal. After that, we present our algorithm and
the performance studies that have been realised to assess it. At
the end, we identify future research opportunities and conclude
by summarizing our findings.
II. S TATE OF THE A RT
A. Location Services
Location Services can be divided into two major ap-
proaches: Flooding and Rendezvous-based. The most relevant
proposals of each one of these groups are described next.
1) Flooding-based location service: Flooding-based loca-
tion services floods the network whenever it is necessary to
find a destination node, using two different operation modes:
proactive and reactive.
In the proactive mode each destination node periodically
floods its location to other nodes in the network, in order to
maintain an updated location table in every node. Proactive
location service is used by Distance Routing Effect Algorithm
for Mobility (DREAM) [9]. In DREAM, each node dissem-
inates its position information with a frequency that depends
on its own mobility: nodes moving faster must broadcast their
location information more often, whilst nodes that are stopped
do not exchange such type of information.
In a reactive mode, there is no periodical exchange of
control information, since the location discovery is triggered
upon request, only when the location of the destination node
is unknown. Under this circumstances, the network is flooded
with control messages. The Reactive Location Service (RLS)
[10] is based on this operation mode. When a node does
not have a valid location for a given destination, starts a
discovery process by sending a location request message to its
neighbourhood. A neighbour node may reply with the location
information, if it is available in its location-table, or may
trigger a flooding process, if it does not know the required
position. In order to reach the destination node directly, the
header of the location request message contains the full path
that will be used to send back the reply message.
2) Rendezvous-based location service: in the Rendezvous-
based location services, all the nodes (potential senders or
receivers) in the network agree upon a mapping that associates
each node unique identifier to one or more other nodes in the
network. To perform such mapping different strategies might
be used: quorum-based or hierarchical-based.
In the quorum-based approach, each nodes sends the lo-
cation update message to an explicit defined subset (update
quorum) of available nodes and a location query for that node
is sent to a potentially different subset (query quorum). In [11],
the authors propose a a scalable quorum-based location service
based on a localized approach, where multiple location servers
replicated on several geographical positions to form a quorum.
In quorum, location updates are propagated in south and north
direction until they reach the boundaries of the network and
location queries are propagated in east and west direct until
the network boundaries. The search packet is bound to obtain
the required location from a rendezvous node between a pair
of column and row quorums.
In the hierarchical-based mechanism, location servers are
chosen via a hashing function, either in the node identifier
space or in the location space.
The Grid Location Service (GLS) [12] is built upon a
set of location servers distributed throughout the network,
with information that is kept up-to-date to cope with nodes’
mobility. This network is formed by an hierarchical grid,
with squares of increasing size, represented by orders. The
smaller squares represent order-1 squares. Four order-1 squares
represents one order-2 square, four order-2 squares represent
one order-3 square and so on. Each node as a unique identifier,
randomly selected by applying a strong hash function to the
node’s unique name. A node chooses its location servers by
selecting a set of nodes with IDs close to its own ID. To
start sending data to an unknown destination, a location query
request is sent through the grid according to the orders and the
destination ID, being the answer sent back through the same
way.
The Hierarchical Location Service (HLS) [13] is somehow
similar to GLS. The HLS covers the entire area network via
a scheme of hierarchy of regions, where the lowest level is
called cell. For each node, one specific cell of each level of
the hierarchy is selected, by means of an hash function. As
the node changes its position it transmits position updates to
these responsible cells. The same hash function is to identify
the node and determine the cells that may hold information
about its position. The node starting the location discovery
process, proceeds to query the nodes in these cells in the order
of the hierarchy, until it receives a reply containing the current
position of destination node.
3) Comparison and Discussion of the Location Services:
As mentioned in previous sections, existing protocols for
location services fall into two categories: flooding-based and
rendezvous-based. Flooding-based location services offer a
simple location solution, which do not scale well with the
network size, as stated by [14]. When comparing the proactive
and reactive approaches, the first one introduces much over-
head with useless information, whilst the second one increases
the latency of the location discovery. Therefore, none of them
seem adequate for VANETs.
The rendezvous-based location services offers also two
type of solutions: quorum-based and hashing-based. From a
comparative viewpoint, authors in [15] argue that the quorum-
based protocols are unsuitable for large size VANET, due
to lack of network expandability, caused by the trade-off
between the number of quorums and the robustness of the
location service. Concerning the hierarchical-based approach,
it provides a scalable solution with the network size, but the
drawback here is related with the overhead needed to deal
with mobility and the increasing probability of unsuccessful
location caused by update/lookup failures in highly mobile
environments.
By taking into account the physical environment context,
one can provide a much simpler and yet efficient location
service, where Road-Side Units (RSUs) may be used to convey
queries and replies, increasing the range and the reliability
of the service, while providing low latency to the location
discovery process.
III. A RCHITECTURE
A. Characterization of Vehicular Network Architecture
The design of a simple location service would benefit if
such service may take into account the properties of the sor-
rowing environment. Then, the first step is the characterization
of the most important VANET scenarios: highway and urban.
Usually, in an highway environment there is an advanced
communications infrastructure used by tolls and traffic man-
agement and surveillance systems. This infrastructure is typ-
ically composed of an optical backbone that interconnects
different systems, such as video surveillance cameras, sensors,
emergency warning and toll systems. Remote communication
is usually performed at the entrances and exists, but may
also exist in some intermediate locations. In this scenario,
deploying RSUs is not a major issue, since equipment is
already disposed along the highways [16].
The urban scenario is much more complex, due to the prop-
erties of the physical map, environment and mobility patterns.
However, one can easily state that, specially in large cities, fleet
transportation systems are already equipped with interesting D. Location Service Protocol
networking facilities, since information of bus schedules is
available, near real-time, at the bus stops. Therefore, enhancing At the level of protocol that will sustain the location
these systems with adequate RSUs is feasible. service, it mainly consists in three phases: The RegistryEntry
Phase, the PositionQuery Phase and the RemoveEntry Phase.
Regarding the vehicles, manufacturers are increasingly
making efforts to ensure that vehicles have embedded on-board
units (OBU) in order to enable communication among them.
In the meanwhile, such communication may be also performed
through smartphones or tablets.
These RSUs may be integrated into the location service
with advantages. In the simplest scenario, they might be used
to host local location servers, providing location information
to a broad range of vehicles, due to their higher coverage
range. In a more advanced scenario, they can provide context
information, such as indication of speed limit signals, curves
and so on, to improve the accuracy of the movement prediction.

B. Location Service Requirements

The new location service must be designed to support the
following requirements:

• Simplicity - the location service must be as simple as

possible, in order to allow a fast adaptation to envi- Fig. 1. OBU Operation Model
ronment dynamics without using a significant amount
of resources or realizing complex operations.
• Context-aware - the service must take into account
the operational characteristics of the environment,
such as the existence of RSUs that might be used
to extend the coverage area; their relative location
regarding the physical topology properties, such as
the existence of curves, speed bumps, intersections or
other things that might affect the prediction of the
vehicles position.
• Accuracy - since the position is a key feature for
position-based routing protocols an accurate predic-
tion scheme must be used in order to cope with
the vehicles mobility. Hence, context and historical Fig. 2. RSU Operation Model
information might be used to improve the accuracy of
prediction. In the RegistryEntry phase, nodes first announce their pres-
ence to its neighborhod with GPSR periodic hello messages
• Performance - the location service must offers a good
with the following fields: Node ID and Position. Whenever a
performance, meaning that both overhead and latency
RSU or a OBU receive one of this GPSR hello messages, it
of location discovery must be small.
updates its Position and Location Tables with this information.
If this message has been received by a RSU, additionally a
C. Location Service Overview location hello message is sent, enunciating itself and querying
about vehicles’s speed. When the vehicle receives this mes-
The SILOS location service is characterized by the use sage, it will return a location update message inform about
of the physical infrastructure present in the vehicular environ- is more updated position and is current speed, as requested.
ment, in order to assist in the process of obtaining the vehicles From this moment, this RSU has full knowledge of the node
positions. In this way, vehicles equipped with OBUs are aware and is ready to receive location requests.
of the presence of a physical communications infrastructure,
which record their positions whenever they are within range The PositionQuery phase will be triggered whenever a
of a RSU. Thus, whenever there is the need to get the position vehicle need to know the location of a destination node. For
of a destination node, vehicles can simple obtain it by the that, first it queries the location service module about its
triggering of a location request to the infrastructure, which knowledge of the desired position. If it has a valid position,
will respond with a prediction of the nodes location, based on it is returned, otherwise it is triggered a location query to the
the context information delegated by the vehicles. In figure 1 nearest RSU. When the RSU receives this query, two situations
and figure 2, it was presented the operation model of the two can occur: Or RSU have knowledge about the request position,
components (OBU and RSU), enlightening their behavior. or not. If it has the vehicle’s position, a location request is
sent immediately containing a prediction of its position. For between them. Regarding the speed, cars starts from 0 m/s and
that it will use a combination of the last known position of the accelerate until they reach 33 m/s, which matches the high-way
vehicle allied to the speed provided in that temporal instant. If speed limit. This speed is constant across the simulation.
the RSU is unaware about the desired position, it is triggered
a RSU Query, interrogating the other on this information. Parameter Value
Simulator NS-3.12
The RemoveEntry phase will always take place when SimulationTime 100s
Number of Nodes 20 nodes
the lifetime of the location table entry expires. In case this Node Spacing 100 m
happens, the whole process of obtaining the position of a Transmission Rate 8192 bps
destination node is again executed. This is because since there Transmission OBU Range 300m
Transmission RSU Range 1000m
is a great mobility of the nodes, their positions have to be Packet Size 512B
continuously updated. Hello Rate 1pkt/s
Location Entry LifeTime 5s
Position Entry LifeTime 5s
E. Location Service Protocol Example Propagation Loss Model Two Ray Ground + Nakagami
TABLE I. S IMULATION PARAMETERS
In order to illustrate the behaviour of the SILOS Protocol,
an application example is presented on figure 3.
B. Evaluation Metrics
In order to evaluate the performance of proposed location
service and assess whether the requirements can be guaranteed,
it was made a comparison between SILOS and RLS according
the establishment of the following evaluation metrics: Location
Overhead (1), Location Accuracy (2) and Time to obtain a
position (3). These metrics are computed as follows:

LocationM essages
LocationOverhead(%) = LocationM essages+RoutingM essages+DataM essages
(1)

PN LocQueries
( CurrentP ositioni −P redictedP ositioni )
LocationAccuracy(m) = i=1
T otalLocationQuerys
(2)

PN LocQueries
( T imeLocationQueryi −T imeLocationReplyi )
T imeObtainP osition(ms) = i=1
T otalLocationQuerys
(3)
Besides that, it was also performed a general comparison
between a position-based protocol coupled with a location ser-
vice and topology-based protocols. Packet Delivery Rate (4),
Routing Overhead (5) and Throughput (6) are the metrics that
were used to assess the protocols.These metrics are computed
as follows:
Fig. 3. Diagram of the SILOS Protocol
T otalN umberP acketsT x
P acketDeliveryRate(%) = T otalN umberP acketsRx (4)
IV. T ESTS
A. Test Scenario T otalM essages−DataM essages
RoutingOverhead(%) = T otalM essages (5)
In order to validate the concept proposed by SILOS, it
was implemented a prototype in the NS-3 simulator. For this
purpose, it was extended the GPSR protocol, implemented in T hroughput(kbps) = N umberP acketsRx∗DataP acketLenght
(6)
T otalT imeSimulation
[3], stripping it of the omniscient location service and adding
to it the SILOS. To test the reliability of this location service, C. Results
it was set up a test scenario where a client node on the network
send data to a server node via a UDP connection between both. 1) Location Service Overhead: Concerning the location
The parameters of this connection are specified in table 1. In service overhead required for the location nodes process, two
terms of mobility, a mobility scenario was developed in which distinctive behaviours are identifiable between SILOS and
nodes representing the RSUs were placed on specific fixed RLS. As can be observed in figure 4, RLS, in a situation
coordinates and the cars were programmed according to a Car of reduced multi-hop transmission, achieves a low overhead
Following Model. On this model, all the vehicles depart from due to the smaller number of messages exchanged through the
a fixed position, one behind the other, leaving a 100 meter gap network. For a situation in which the number of hops increases,
this value starts to rise almost exponentially, congesting the
network. This congestion is harmful to the routing information,
lowering the packet’s delivery.
Fig. 4. Location Service Overhead versus Distance
Regarding SILOS, given the procedure of registration and
discovery is always the same, regardless the number of nodes
in the network and the distance between them, there is a
constant overhead rate. This enables higher rates of package
delivery in the most demanding situations, especially when the
destination node is relatively far.
2) Location Accuracy: Regarding the precision of the node
location, figure 5 shows an elevated amount of errors associ-
ated with the RLS in relation to SILOS. This happens due
to the way RLS discovers the node’s position, reaching out to
the neighbour nodes when the emitting node does not have the
required position and repeating this same process through out
all the neighbour nodes until the position is known. This modus
operandi makes RLS naturally weaker when the destination
node is further from the emitting node.
The SILOS delegates the discovery process to the infras-
tructure, benefiting from its global node information. For this
level of precision, the prediction scheme is also fundamental.
Fig. 5. Location Accuracy versus Distance
3) Time to obtain position: Figure 6 show us a comparison
about the time it takes to obtain a position, between SILOS
and RLS protocol. Both were tested, with the common routing
protocol GPSR. As can be seen, RLS has a progressive
increase of the time it takes to obtain a position as the
distance increases, while SILOS remains constant regardless
of distance. This progressive increase is explained by the time
lost during multi-hop forwarding, required for the message to
travel between the transmitter-receiver pair.
In SILOS, this message does not has to travel the nodes
between this pair, but instead, just reach the RSU incumbent
for the service. This RSU will respond directly in single hop
given the range from RSUs antennas, improving the overall
position obtaining time.
Fig. 6. Time to obtain a position versus Distance
4) Packet Delivery Rate: In terms of Packet Delivery Rate,
a more wider comparison between AODV and GPSR coupled
various location services was taken under consideration. As a
result it is possible to analyse the impact that the location
service leads in the subsequent packet routing. Based on
figure 7, the first conclusion that can be taken is the lack of
viability of the topology-based protocols in dynamic multi-hop
scenarios, in contrast with position-based protocols. Another
conclusion that can be taken is the impact that the choice
of location service has in the subsequent routing of packets.
Based on the behaviour of RLS, the higher the distance to
the destination, more broadcast queries are made, making the
whole process of obtaining position very difficult; this clearly
has an impact on the routing process. SILOS coupled with
GPSR is able to provide an acceptable delivery rate, almost
reaching the limit that is provided by GPSR coupled with GOD
Location Service.
Fig. 7. Packet Delivery Rate vs Distance
5) Routing Overhead: In what concerns the Routing Over-
head metrics, it contemplates both routing and location service
overhead. In this way, it is verifiable the real overhead needed
for the position-based protocols operationalization. As can be
observed in figure 8, the GPSR with SILOS coupled overhead
values are constant because the routing overhead is the same
regardless of distance. This consists in the periodic Hello
send-outs and the location’s overhead is, almost fully, the
required overhead for the location management. The AODV
protocol’s overhead is much higher given the unawareness of
the destination’s node position. Due to this situation, there
are control packets which circulate the network even if the
destination node is in front or behind itself. This is harmful
to the overhead values and, consequently, to the bandwidth
usage.
Fig. 8. Routing Overhead vs Distance
6) Throughput: Even though the Packet Delivery Rate’s
metrics express in a clear way the level of packet delivery,
it matters to figure out through a bandwidth point of view,
how much the volume of packets transfer per second is. As it
can be seen in figure 9, as the distance increases, the AODV
protocol’s throughput diminishes due to the overhead routing
values but, mostly, to a destination vehicle agnostic forwarding.
The GPSR with SILOS coupled offers a reasonable overhead
value, a more efficient forwarding which contributes to a higher
throughput value.
Fig. 9. Throughput vs Distance
V. C ONCLUSION
In this work, it was proceeded the development of a
location service that takes advantage of the communications
infrastructure present in the vehicular environment in order
to achieve an efficient localization of vehicles position and
thus help to increase the performance of routing vehicle.
In order to assess this location service, it was implemented
a prototype in NS-3 simulator and then comparison tests
were performed with the intention of attest its feasibility.
The result of these tests concluded that indeed there are real
gains with this infrastructure exploitation and position-based
protocols coupled with a specific location service to vehicular
environment have performances definitely more favorable than
traditional topology-based protocols.
As future work it is intended to evaluate some more
meaningful metrics, to attest the viability of the proposed
location service, such as Location Query Sucess Rate and its
Robustness to high levels of network load. It is also intent to
transpose this service for the urban environment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partially supported by national funds
through FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under
project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2013.
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