Realistic Simulation of Network Protocols in VANET Scenarios

Simulation of network protocol behavior in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) scenarios is the predominant basis for evaluating the applicability of particular protocols developed in the Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) domain. As the selection of a mobility model influences the outcome of simulations to a great deal, the use of a representative model is necessary for producing meaningful evaluation results. In this work, we discuss and motivate the needs for coupling traffic micro simulation with standard network simulation. In particular, we developed such an integrated traffic/network simulation tool for evaluating network protocols in realistic VANET environments. In our work, we employed well-studied microsimulation models and wireless ad hoc network models from the domain of transportation and traffic science and the networking community, respectively. It could be shown that network simulations that make use of realistic traffic models produce vastly different results than those relying on commonly used simplistic models, while their adoption incurs only negligible performance penalties.