Implementation of the IEEE 802.11p/1609.4 DSRC/WAVE in NS-2

Due to the high costs of deploying and testing VANETs, simulations are required for development and evaluation of new protocols at any layer of WAVE protocol stack. Although there are powerful tools to simulate VANETs and especially the IEEE 802.11p/1609.4 DSRC/WAVE protocols, however, they are not free or not publically available. NS-2 Network Simulator is a free and widely accepted simulator used by researchers to simulate DSRC/WAVE. To the best of our knowledge, current version of NS-2 and developed simulation tools based on NS-2 do not appropriately support for the multichannel operation of the IEEE 802.11p/1609.4. In this paper, a new developed simulation tool based on NS-2 is introduced that provides a more realistic implementation of DSRC multiple channels and IEEE 1609.4 multichannel operation. The developed simulation tool has been tested through some simulation experiments.