Mobile Agent-Based Information Dissemination Scheme Using Location Information in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) consists of vehicles (mobile nodes) and road side units which are equipped with the wireless devices such as wireless LANs. Mobile nodes exchange information messages with each other so that VANETs are configured in a self-organized manner. As one of network service scenarios in VANETs, there is a network service to provide the parking spaces in the city central to vehicles (mobile nodes). In this scenario, the road side units (source nodes) which are deployed at the parking spaces periodically disseminate the number of available parking spaces to mobile nodes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a mobile agent-based information dissemination scheme using location information of mobile nodes and source nodes in the VANET environment. In addition, we conduct simulation experiments in the VANET environment to evaluate the proposed mobile agent-based information dissemination scheme. We confirmed that it could disseminate information messages with lower overhead because mobile agents migrate among mobile nodes by using the location information.