Efficient forwarding of symbolically addressed geocast messages

Geocast is used to send messages to all hosts located in a geographic area. This target area can be defined either by geometric figures like polygons or by symbolic addresses like city names or room numbers. Geographic routing algorithms, which forward messages based on geographic information, can be used to forward geocast messages. If routing of symbolically addressed messages is based on geometric coordinates, complex mappings between symbolic addresses and their geometric extent as well as complex geometric operations are required. Therefore, we propose a routing algorithm for symbolically addressed geocast messages that operates directly on a symbolic location model. This approach does not require any geometric information for message forwarding, and forwarding decisions can be realized efficiently by comparably simple operations.