GeoMob: A mobility-aware geocast scheme in metropolitans via taxicabs and buses

Geocast, delivering messages to a specific location, has become an important issue with the accelerated development of the location-based services in mobile networks. Geocast in the automotive domain is of particular interest, enabling many promising applications, such as geographic advertising, location-based traffic alerts, etc. Different from the conventional geocast algorithms focusing on the distance-based approaches, in this paper, we propose a mobility-aware geocast algorithm (GeoMob) for urban VANETs from the Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) perspective to better deal with the high mobility and transient connectivity issues. Different levels and aspects of vehicle mobility information are employed, making GeoMob very simple, scalable and communication and compunction-effective. Practical issues are well considered by introducing real-world trace analysis, trace-driven simulation and efficient buffer management. Extensive performance comparisons with other protocols have been conducted to show the advantages of GeoMob.