A realistic mobility simulator for vehicular ad hoc networks

During the last few years, continuous progresses in wireless communications
have opened new research fields in computer networking, aimed at
extending data networks connectivity to environments where wired solutions
are impracticable. Among these, vehicular traffic is attracting a growing attention
from both academia and industry, due to the amount and importance
of the related applications, ranging from road safety to traffic control, up
to mobile entertainment. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are selforganized
networks built up from moving vehicles, and are part of the broader
class of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Because of their peculiar
characteristics, VANETs require the definition of specific networking techniques,
whose feasibility and performance are usually tested by means of
simulation. One of the main challenges posed by VANETs simulations is the
faithful characterization of vehicular mobility at both macroscopic and microscopic
levels, leading to realistic non-uniform distributions of cars and
velocity, and unique connectivity dynamics. Yet, freely distributed tools
which are commonly used for academic studies only consider limited vehicular
macro-mobility issues, while they pay little or no attention to vehicular
micro-mobility and its interaction with the macro-mobility counterpart.
Such a simplistic approach can easily raise doubts on the confidence of derived
VANETs simulation results. In this paper we first present and describe
VanetMobiSim, a freely available generator of realistic vehicular movement
traces for telecommunication networks simulators. VanetMobiSim is validated
first by illustrating how the interaction between featured macro- and
micro-mobility is able to reproduce typical phenomena of vehicular traffic.
Then, the traces generated by VanetMobiSim are formally validated against
those obtained from CORSIM, a benchmark traffic generator in transportation
research.