Analysing Impact of Mobility Dynamics on Multicast Routing in Vehicular Networks

Enabling Internet to Vehicular multicast communication is fraught with challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of the two networks. While the conventional multicasting in the Internet relies on ”structured” multicast routing, it is not clear how robust can be such routing structure in vehicular networks. We study the robustness of the multicast routing structure in vehicular networks for data flow from the Internet to a set of vehicles. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the urban traffic dynamics on the link stability of the multicast tree. Our study shows that in an intersection scenario, the link can be sufficiently stable without depending much on the relative direction of the vehicles, while on straight roads, the link stability is largely affected by the relative direction. Keywords—Multicast routing; vehicular networks; urban traffic dynamics; link stability