Geocast Routing Protocols for VANETs: Survey and Guidelines

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks VANETs, a multitude of applications need to address not a single vehicle on the road, nor the whole totality of vehicles, but only a community of vehicles which share the same geographic location for the purpose of safety, traffic efficiency, advertising or infotainment. The goal is to transmit data from a unique source node to a set of destination nodes satisfying a set of geographic criteria. Geocast routing protocol in VANETs appear to be the most appropriate routing technique for these applications. In this investigation, we introduce some existing Geocast routing protocols for VANETs and then we provide a classification of these protocols based on the used relay selection technique. We present a comparison of these Geocast routing protocols according to different criteria and finally, we highlight some directions we are considering for our Geocast routing solution for VANETs.