Performance evaluation for multicast transmissions in VANET

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a network that is formed when vehicles with wireless transceiver have the need to communicate with each other. Although VANET shares some similarities with mobile ad hoc network (MANET), the dynamic nature of VANET has posed a challenge in designing routing protocols. This paper shows the performance evaluation between unicast and multicast routing protocols implemented in a vehicular environment that is based on Manhattan grid model for transmission between one sender and multiple receivers. Unlike multicast transmission in geocast routing, the multiple receivers for the paper scenario are not located in a specific geographic region. Performance is evaluated in term of average end-to-end delay, throughput, packet delivery ratio and routing overhead. The results reveal a consistent performance for multicast protocols as the number of receiving nodes increases during the transmission.