A reliable quality of service aware fault tolerant gateway discovery protocol for vehicular networks

AbstractA great interest in vehicular ad‐hoc networks has been noticed by the research community. General goals of vehicular networks are to enhance safety on the road and to ensure the convenience of passengers by continuously providing them, in real time, with information and entertainment options such as routes to destinations, traffic conditions, facilities' information, and multimedia/Internet access. Indeed, time efficient systems that have high connectivity and low bandwidth usage are most needed to cope with realistic traffic mobility conditions. One foundation of such a system is the design of an efficient gateway discovery protocol that guarantees robust connectivity between vehicles, while assuring Internet access. Little work has been performed on how to concurrently integrate load balancing, quality of service (QoS), and fault tolerant mechanisms into these protocols. In this paper, we propose a reliable QoS‐aware and location aided gateway discovery protocol for vehicular networks by the name of fault tolerant location‐based gateway advertisement and discovery. One of the features of this protocol is its ability to tolerate gateway routers and/or road vehicle failure. Moreover, this protocol takes into consideration the aspects of the QoS requirements specified by the gateway requesters; furthermore, the protocol insures load balancing on the gateways as well as on the routes between gateways and gateway clients. We discuss its implementation and report on its performance in contrast with similar protocols through extensive simulation experiments using the ns‐2 simulator. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.