Scalable VANET Simulations with NS-3

The study of large scale scenarios in vehicular ad-hoc networks is of critical importance to the design of communication protocols and applications. Since management and operation of a large number of real nodes is unpractical, simulation is considered as the most viable methodology to evaluate such large scale scenarios. However, the widely used simulator NS-3 has limited performance and scalability, causing the simulation of medium scale networks with more than 1,000 nodes to become very hard. In this paper we identify the sources of such performance limitations and propose possible improvements to the physical and mobility layers of NS-3. Our results show that the proposed NS-3 optimization leads to significant performance improvements both in execution time and memory usage, making it feasible to run simulations with more than 10 000 nodes.