Wireless mesh networks allow building cheap scalable networks to serve mobile users in large areas. Geocast is a kind of group communication, whereby the group of recievers of a message is defined by their presence in a given geographic area. The correlation of geographical and topological distance between nodes in wireless mesh networks enables new optimizations for geocast routing protocols.

This work presents the performance of existing multicast routing protocols built for wireless mesh networks when used to transport geocast messages. It also includes upcoming problems in newly developed multi-path routing protocols and possible single-path routing protocols for the dissemination of geocast messages. Moreover, two single-path routing protocols based on the unicast routing protocols AODV and OLSR have been developed.

Both these protocols have been analyzed for their performance in simulations using the network simulator ns2. The 2nd floor of the computer science building at the University of Stuttgart has been used as an environmental model. Geocast-routing based on AODV networks proved to work well with a rather constrained set of network parameters only. Geocast-routing based on OLSR networks showed worse performance. This, however, might be due to the fact that an outdated version of OLSR had to be used for the simulation. This could have distorted the results.