A Hierarchical Failure Detector Based on Architecture in VANETs

The failure detector is one of the fundamental components for maintaining high availability of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). However, the dynamic nature of VANETs caused by the high mobility of vehicles and communication link failures has a serious impact on the performance of failure detection. Therefore, it is very meaningful to design a suitable failure detector that can deal with the dynamic nature of VANETs well. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical failure detector based on the architecture of VANETs. This failure detector can adapt to the dynamic network conditions and meet the different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of multiple applications in VANETs. Different from existing failure detectors, we propose a failure detector that employs a detection-result sharing mechanism and groups the nodes according to the architecture of VANETs. We evaluate our proposed failure detector by using NS2 and GT-ITM to simulate the work environment of VANETs. The experimental result shows that our proposed failure detector can improve the detection time by at most 45% and the detection accuracy by at most 25% under similar detection overhead.