A survey of geocast routing protocols

Abstract

Geocasting is the delivery of a message to nodes within a geographical region. With geocast, new services and applications are feasible, such as finding friends who are nearby, geographic advertising, and accident or wrong-way driver warning on a motorway. In this article we present a survey on geocast routing protocols. The protocols mainly differ in whether they are based on flooding, directed flooding, or on routing without flooding, and whether they are suitable for ad hoc networks or for infrastructure networks. Based on these criteria we propose a classification of geocast protocols. Our protocol comparison includes message and memory complexity, robustness, and the ability to deliver geocast packets in partially partitioned networks. Finally, we present simulations to compare the approaches based on flooding, directed flooding, and routing without flooding.