Information Systems, Technology and Management - 4th International Conference, ICISTM 2010, Bangkok, Thailand, March 11-13, 2010. Proceedings (Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol 54)

"Service Discovery Protocols for VANET Based Emergency Preparedness Class of Applications: A Necessity Public Safety and Security (p. 1-2)

1 Introduction

In emergency preparedness and response class of application, service discovery plays an important role in the discovery of surrounding services that can help rescuers to achieve their tasks. Let us suppose that there is an incident at a site. Rescuers have to collaborate between each other in order to perform their tasks. A good collaboration between the di?erent rescuers depends from the knowledge of services available and the capability to reach them even if the network is highly dynamic.

Therefore, a good service discovery protocol that permits to rescuers to collaborate between each other is necessary. Besides, at an incident site, there is no ?xed or static topology. Rescuers can be characterized by their high mobility, or low mobility, they can be moving in groups or individually. Many participants can exist at the same site (?re?ghters, policemen, nurses, victims...) and participants can use diverse devices (sensors, laptops, PDAs, palmtops...).

In this paper, we focus on service discovery for emergency preparedness and response class of applications in vehicular networks. As the main goal of a vehicular network is to guarantee security on roads, several secondary objectives, or prerequisites, have to be achieved in order to reach the main objective. In fact, emergency preparedness and response class of application in vehicular networks heavily depends on service discovery for various reasons such as determining location and proximity of hospitals, service stations; determination of locations of accidents and disasters and user guidance to alternatives roads; automotive diagnosis and user warning.

As a consequence, the de?nition of a service discovery system [5] among the vehicular nodes is one of the prerequisites needed in order to make viable many of the emergency preparedness and response class of application in vehicular networks. The service discovery problem consists of ?nding services that satisfy a driver’s request. Such a problem is very ample and extensive and it has been investigated in many areas such as wired networks, ad hoc networks, mesh networks, vehicular networks.

The reminder of this paper is organized as follow. In section 2 we discuss the importance of service discovery for emergency preparedness and response class of application in vehicular networks. In section 3, we present some related works on service discovery protocols. Finally, in section 4 we present our conclusion."