A promising CUDA-accelerated vehicular area network simulator using NS-3

Both size and computational activities of Vehicular Area Network (VANET) are growing. Simulation of VANETs not only requires the simulation of network standards, but also requires the mobility of nodes. Such a dynamic system involves computations of node distances, routing protocols, application layers, data send, data receive, etc. The simulation model of VANET requires both hardware and software supports to deal with massive computational problems. Currently available network simulators, like Network Simulator 3 (NS-3), are not adequate for simulating large-scale VANET systems. In this work, we propose a Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)-assisted VANET simulation model for multicore Central Processing Unit (CPU) / manycore Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platform to increase computational throughput. The proposed VANET/GPU simulator uses NS-3 as the core engine and improves throughput by exploiting massively parallel processing on the GPU. Experimental results show that the overall computation speedup can be increased up to 129x by using the proposed VANET/GPU simulator.