Farthest destination selection and Shortest Path Connection strategy for efficient multicasting in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With technology advancement, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been requested to provide one-to-many group communications (i.e. multicasting) for business and entertainment applications such as video conferences and file sharings. For these group communication applications, the existing broadcasting-based and unicasting-based approaches designed for safety applications however cause high packet generations and redundant data transmissions, respectively. Although the well-known Shortest Path Tree (SPT) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithms for multicasting have been proposed, they achieve only a specific goal such as the reduction of delay or tree cost. Thus, for reducing end-to-end delay, delay variation, and transmission number requested for delay-sensitive and cost-efficient group communications and supporting high mobility of vehicles, this paper proposes a multicast protocol which uses the Farthest destination Selection and Shortest path Connection (FSSC) strategy to form a multicast tree. FSSC relies on the road map information and the location information of vehicles and intersections. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of FSSC.