A Survey of Geocast Routing Protocols in Opportunistic Networks

Geocasting supports communication in a challenged environment by addressing various routing issues to a wide range of applications it exploits intermittent connectivity among mobile devices to support opportunistic message transfer over a short-range radio transmission, Variety of surveys have been carried out in the literature concerning general OppNets. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of OppNet geocast routing protocols. It further highlights Geocast OppNet characteristics and envisioned application areas different from general OppNets. Additionally, this paper studies existing geocasting routing solutions based on message endpoint, forwarding utility computation approach, determining the relay node, routing decision approach and message dissemination. Finally, we have identified current challenges and future research direction for routing in OppNet geocast.