Aspects and trends in realistic VANET simulations

Realistic simulations of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are necessary to evaluate novel technologies based on such networks and to prove benefits obtained from their implementation. This survey gathers from several research domains aspects that increase the quality of VANET simulations. It explains a multi-fold nature of VANETs and presents main building blocks of their simulation-traffic and network simulators. The paper proposes a comprehensive architecture for VANET simulation platform that focuses on producing reliable results. The architecture contains traffic and network simulators that communicate with each other in a dynamic and bi-directional way. The concept of a realistic traffic generator is introduced. It uses real-world data (e.g. maps, traffic volume counts) to model an activity-based traffic varying in time. The traffic generator aims at reproducing accurate vehicular traces for urban scenario. A higher level of realism can be obtained by modelling of human behaviour with intelligent agents and by the implementation of related subsystems, like traffic management and control or weather factors.