Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been gained importance for the inter-vehicle communication that supports local communication between vehicles without any expensive infrastructure and considerable configuration efforts. How to provide light-weight and scalable location management service which facilitates geographic routing in VANETs remains a fundamental issue. In this paper we will present a novel peer-to-peer location management protocol, called PLM, to provide location management service in VANETs. PLM makes use of high mobility in VANETs to disseminate vehicles' historical location information over the network. A vehicle is able to predict current location of other vehicles with Kalman filtering technique. Our theoretical analysis shows that PLM is able to achieve high location information availability with a low protocol overhead and latency. The simulation results indicate that PLM can provide fairly accurate location information with quite low communication overhead in VANETs.
