Realistic mobility models for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) simulations

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is surging in popularity, in which vehicles constitute the mobile nodes in the network. Due to the prohibitive cost of deploying and implementing such a system in real world, most research in VANET relies on simulations for evaluation. A key component for VANET simulations is a realistic vehicular mobility model that ensures that conclusions drawn from simulation experiments will carry through to real deployments. In this work, we first introduce a tool MOVE that allows users to rapidly generate realistic mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE is built on top of an open source micro-traffic simulator SUMO. The output of MOVE is a realistic mobility model and can be immediately used by popular network simulators such as ns-2 and qualnet. We evaluate the effects of details of mobility models in three case studies of VANET simulations (specifically, the existence of traffic lights, driver route choice and car overtaking behavior) and show that selecting sufficient level of details in the simulation is critical for VANET protocol design.