Obstacle Avoidance for Utility-Based Geocasting

Geocasting is the delivery of messages to all recipients within a specific geospatial region. While good algorithms exist to provide geocasting services, they do not perform well in the presence of large obstacles. We define an obstacle as any region of the network through which a message may not be directly transmitted. Given this definition, we developed a simple mechanism that allows messages to skirt around obstacles and ultimately reach their destination. We claim that this approach can dramatically improve the delivery rates of messages in adverse topologies, and support our claim with experimental results including both our utility function based geocasting protocol as well as the well-known location based multicast (LBM) and Voronoi region multicasting approaches.