Farthest destination selection and Shortest Path Connection strategy for efficient multicasting in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

With technology advancement, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been requested to provide one-to-many group communications (i.e. multicasting) for business and entertainment applications such as video conferences and file sharings. For these group communication applications, the existing broadcasting-based and unicasting-based approaches designed for safety applications however cause high packet generations and redundant data transmissions, respectively. Although the well-known Shortest Path Tree (SPT) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithms for multicasting have been proposed, they achieve only a specific goal such as the reduction of delay or tree cost. Thus, for reducing end-to-end delay, delay variation, and transmission number requested for delay-sensitive and cost-efficient group communications and supporting high mobility of vehicles, this paper proposes a multicast protocol which uses the Farthest destination Selection and Shortest path Connection (FSSC) strategy to form a multicast tree. FSSC relies on the road map information and the location information of vehicles and intersections. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of FSSC.