Performance Evaluation of Reactive Routing Protocols for VANETs in Urban Scenarios Following Good Simulation Practices

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs), which allow communications between vehicles and with the road infrastructure, have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade. Many routing protocols have been proposed for VANET and their performance is normally evaluated using simulation-based studies. However, conducting reliable simulation studies is not a trivial task since many simulation parameters should be correctly configured. This paper presents a methodology for conducting reliable simulations in urban scenarios for VANETs based on a set of good simulation practices. The proposed methodology includes relevant simulation aspects such as number of simulations, warm-up periods, and the selection of source-destination pairs, among other parameters. Furthermore, the proposed methodology has been used to evaluate several well known MANET routing protocols such as AODV, Dymo, LAR, and DSR, in urban scenarios. The obtained simulations results indicate that in most cases LAR configured in Step mode achieves the best results.