A Survey of Multicast Routing Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are autonomous and self-configurable wireless ad hoc networks and considered as a subset of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). MANET is composed of self-organizing mobile nodes which communicate through a wireless link without any network infrastructure. A VANET uses vehicles as mobile nodes for creating a network within a range of 100 to 1000 meters. VANET is developed for improving road safety and for providing the latest services of intelligent transport system (ITS). The development and designing of efficient, self-organizing, and reliable VANET are a challenge because the node's mobility is highly dynamic which results in frequent network disconnections and partitioning. VANET protocols reduce the power consumption, transmission overhead, and network partitioning successfully by using multicast routing schemes. In multicasting, the messages are sent to multiple specified nodes from a single source. The novel aspect of this paper is that it categorizes all VANET multicast routing protocols into geocast and cluster-based routing. Moreover, the performance of all protocols is analyzed by comparing their routing techniques and approaches.