A framework for IP and non-IP multicast services for vehicular networks

Enabling drivers to be connected to the Internet and/or Vehicular Ad-hoc networks, is one of the main challenges of the future networking. This enables drivers to benefit from the existing Internet services as well as emerging ITS applications based on IP or non-IP communications (e.g geonetworking). Many of ITS applications such as fleet management require multicast data delivery. Existing works on this subject tackle mainly the problems of IP multicasting inside the Internet or geocasting in VANETs. This paper presents a new framework that enables Internet-based multicast services on top of VANETs. We introduce a self-configuring multicast addressing scheme based on the geographic locations of the vehicles coupled with a simplified approach that locally manages the group membership to allow packet delivery from the Internet. Moreover, we propose an approach that selects the appropriate network-layer protocol for either geocasting or IP multicasting depending on the vehicles´ context and the application requirements. Finally, we present the integration of the designed framework to the ITS reference architecture.