A low communication cost and delay guaranteed multicast approach for next generation vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicle Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) is an emerging wireless network technology whereby information is generally shared among vehicles through multi-hopping In literature, a number of routing approaches has been proposed for reducing the end-to-end delay. However, the routing approaches applied to support multicast service will be inefficient since none of them considered the share path in VANETs. This paper considers the delay-bound guaranteed multicast service where a vehicle aims to send a message to a group of vehicles using minimal bandwidth within a guaranteed delay bound. The source and multicast destinations are location-aware and trip-aware. Therefore the multicast approach developed for VANETs is totally different to the one in ad hoc networks. The proposed approach forwards the multicast message to the vehicles in the multicast group along the road segment with the least time cost, reserving as much as possible the remaining time for carry-and-forward transmissions which helps reduce the bandwidth consumption for packet transmissions.