Adaptive Lookup Protocol for Two-Tier VANET/P2P Information Retrieval Services

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) services have attracted significant attention in recent years. To support ITS services, architecture is required to retrieve information and data from moving vehicles and roadside facilities in an efficient manner. A two-tier system that integrates low-tier vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and a high-tier infrastructure-based peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay, which can achieve a high lookup success rate and low lookup latency for information retrieval, has been developed. However, conventional information lookups in the two-tier VANET/P2P system may introduce extra lookup messages and latencies because the lookup queries are simultaneously performed over the VANET/P2P networks. This paper proposes an adaptive lookup protocol for the two-tier VANET/P2P system to improve the efficiency of information retrieval. The proposed protocol uses a Bloom filter, which is a space-efficient data structure, to collect reachability information of road segments; therefore, adaptive routing of queries between low- and high-tier networks according to reachability probability can be employed. Simulations based on the SUMO traffic simulator and QualNet network simulator demonstrate that compared with the conventional two-tier lookup mechanism, the adaptive lookup protocol can reduce the lookup latency by 12%, reduce the P2P lookup overhead by 20%-33%, and achieve a high success rate in information lookups.