• VANET
• middleware
• multicast

This thesis defines a novel semantic for multicast in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and it defines a middleware, the Localized Vehicular Multicast Middleware (LVMM) that enables minimum cost, source-based multicast communications in VANETs. The middleware provides support to find vehicles suitable to sustain multicast communications, to maintain multicast groups, and to execute a multicast routing protocol, the Vehicular Multicast Routing Protocol (VMRP), that delivers messages of multicast applications to all the recipients utilizing a loop-free, minimum cost path from each source to all the recipients. LVMM does not require a vehicle to know all other members: only knowledge of directly reachable nodes is required to perform the source-based routing.