Geocast, which allows for forwarding messages to hosts residing at specified geographic areas, is a promising communication paradigm with a wide range of applications. Geocast target areas can be specified either by geometric figures or symbolic addresses, such as /usa/fl/miami/market-street.

In this paper, we present a novel geocast routing protocol for symbolically addressed messages. Compared to geocast protocols based on geometric information, our protocol can operate on simple symbolic location models, and message forwarding does not require costly geometric operations. The proposed protocol is based on an overlay network that is mapped to an IP-based network infrastructure. The overlay network is structured in a hierarchical fashion, to ensure a scalable global geocast service supporting also large target areas. Although our protocol does not rely on a layer 3 multicast protocol, we also show how to improve the performance of message forwarding by integrating a light-weight layer 3 multicast protocol. Our evaluations of the protocol underline the scalability of our approach and show good routing quality leading to short message paths.