Cluster-based location service schemes in VANETs: current state, challenges and future directions

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have drawn incredible interest in both academic and industrial sectors due to their potential applications and services. Vehicles’ position plays a significant role in many location-based applications and services such as public emergency, vehicles tracking, resource discovery, traffic monitoring and position-based routing. A location service is used to keep up-to-date records of current positions of vehicles. However, locating vehicles’ positions and maintaining an accurate view of the entire network are quite challenging tasks due to the high number of nodes, and high and fast nodes mobility which results in rapid topological changes and sudden network disconnections. In the past literature, various location-based services have been proposed to solve the above mentioned issues. Moreover, the cluster-based location service schemes have gained a growing interest due to their advantages over non-cluster-based schemes. The cluster-based schemes improve the network scalability, reduce the communications overhead and resolve the mobility issues within the clusters preventing them from propagating in the whole network. Therefore, this paper presents the taxonomy of the existing location service schemes, inspects the cluster-based location service by highlighting their strengths and limitations, and provides a comparison between location-based clustering and application specific clustering such as the one used in routing, information dissemination, channel access management and security. In addition, the existing clustering schemes, challenges and future directions for efficient cluster-based location service are also discussed.