A Novel Mobility Model for Realistic Behavior in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

Mobility models or the movement patterns of nodes communicating wirelessely, play a vital role in the simulation-based evaluation of vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Even though recent research has developed models that better corresponds to real world mobility, we still have a limited understanding of the level of the required level of mobility details for modeling and simulating VANETs. In this paper, we propose a new mobility model for VANETs that works on the city area. In this model we map the topology of streets and behavior of vehicles at the intersection of roads. In our proposed model, we change the speed of nodes after some specific distance in accordance to neighboring nodes, so this will lead a realistic situation on the roads. Our new proposed model accounts the various characteristics of VANETs such as traffic lights, acceleration/deceleration due to nearby vehicles, attraction points where maximum numbers of vehicle tends to go. Using the real and controlled map of street, we compare our mobility model with the random direction mobility model. Our result demonstrates that probability of link availability in VANETs is more sensitive to the vehicles waiting at intersections and acceleration/deceleration of vehicles. We also found that probability of link availability suffers at the intersection of the roads, because some nodes cross the signal continue movement in horizontal direction while some nodes change the direction of traveling to vertical.