Application of IPv6 multicast to VANET

Vehicular networks (VANET) attract a lot of attention in the research world. Novel vehicular applications need suitable communication mechanisms to extend in-vehicle capabilities and, be aware about surrounding events. However, these networks present some characteristics, such as high mobility or specific topologies. These properties affect the performances of applications and more effort should be directed to identify the final network requirements. One of the most important challenges is the availability of an appropriate addressing mechanism to transmit information to vehicles in a target area. In this scope, the multicast mechanism with IPv6 is considered as a suitable and appropriate solution for those applications. Thus, in this paper, we study and analyze the possibilities for integrating IPv6 multicast mechanism in VANET context. We particularly propose to encode GPS coordinates into the IPv6 multicast address and to use digital map in order to map multicast addresses to dedicated areas.