WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND MOBILE COMPUTING Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. (2013) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/wcm.2420 RESEARCH ARTICLE MQBV: multicast quality of service swarm bee routing for vehicular ad hoc networks Salim Bitam 1 * , Abdelhamid Mellouk 2 and Scott Fowler 3 1 LESIA Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Biskra, PO. Box 145 R.P. 07000 Biskra, Algeria 2 Department of Networks and Telecommuinications & LiSSI Laboratory, IUT C/V, University of Paris-Est Crétel VdM (UPEC), 122, rue Paul Armangot 94400 Vitry-sur-Seine, France 3 Mobile Telecommunications, Department of Science and TechnologyITN, Linköping University, Bredgatan 34, SE-601 74, Norrköping, Sweden ABSTRACT Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are witnessing in recent years a rapid development for road transmissions and are considered as one of the most important types of next generation networks, in which drivers can have access anywhere and anytime to information. However, vehicles have to deal with many challenges such as the links failures due to their frequent mobility as well as limited degrees of freedom in their mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose a new quality of service multicast and multipath routing protocol for VANETs, based on the paradigm of bee’s communication, called mul- ticast quality of service swarm bee routing for VANETs (MQBV). The MQBV finds and maintains robust routes between the source node and all multicast group members. Therefore, the average end-to-end delay and the normalized overhead load should be reduced, while at the same time increasing the average bandwidth and the packet delivery ratio. Extensive simulation results were obtained using ns-2 simulator in a realistic VANET settings and demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed protocol. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEYWORDS vehicular ad hoc network; routing; bee swarm; quality of service; road safety *Correspondence Salim Bitam, LESIA Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Biskra, PO. Box 145 R.P. 07000 Biskra, Algeria. E-mail: salimbitam@gmail.com 1. INTRODUCTION The need for improvement of road safety and comfort for passengers by avoiding accidents and traffic conges- tion has given rise to intelligent transportation systems known as VANETs [1]. An interest in such networks has been growing in the last few years as they are capable of providing several services for drivers and authorities in both rural and urban areas. VANETs provide timely and accurate information to the vehicle drivers offered by the network members or by Internet access that correspond to their requirements such as traffic and collision avoidance, breakdown services, and fuel station locations. Vehicular ad hoc network is a unique type of mobile ad hoc network and consists of a set of heterogeneous nodes, which could be divided into mobile nodes (vehi- cles) that move according to a realistic mobility model and fixed equipments described as road side units (RSUs). It is a distributed, adaptive and packet radio network, charac- terized by fast and frequent changes of network topology [2] caused by the very high speed variation of vehicles and a certain degrees of freedom in their mobility patterns due to many factors including road course, encompass- ing traffic and traffic regulations [1]. The main purpose in such networks is to provide communications among vehi- cles via inter-vehicle communication and between vehicles and road side units via roadside to vehicle communica- tion such as the Internet access points placed along the road in order to improve the road safety [3]. It is worth noting that VANET entities can be deployed at critical locations such as slippery roads, service stations, accident warning, dangerous intersections, or places well-known for hazardous weather conditions [4]. In these situations, one of the most important requirements is the transmis- sion of safety messages with a certain level of quality of service (QoS) from a source node to a set of endangered vehicles. This transmission mode is known as multicast Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.