Usefulness of multicast routing protocols for vehicular Ad-hoc networks

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) combines telematics with the conventional world of surface transportation infrastructure to fulfill four major transportation goals including safety, environmental protection, efficiency, and economy. The promising technique for building the ITS, VANETs are a subclass of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) with unique characteristics such as special mobility patterns, rapidly changeable topology, and temporary network fragmentation. VANETs have the potential to enhance the transportation safety, support traveller information, improve traffic flow, and develop comfort applications. Realizing these applications has resulted in new challenges for VANETs´ routing protocols. Providing one-to-many and many-to-many communications for the new applications of VANETs causes the popularity of multicast routing protocols. Therefore, in this paper, at first, some applications which inherently need multicast routing protocols are introduced. Then we precisely look over the usefulness of current multicast routing protocols for VANETs.