Mobility models for vehicular ad hoc networks: a survey and taxonomy

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have been recently attracting an
increasing attention from both research and industry communities. One of the
challenges posed by the study of VANETs is the definition of a generic mobility
model providing an accurate, realistic vehicular mobility description at
both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Today, most mobility models for
vehicular studies only consider a limited macro-mobility, involving restricted
vehicles movements, while little or no attention is paid to micro-mobility and
its interaction with the macro-mobility counterpart. On the other hand, the
research community cannot have access to realistic traffic generator which
have not been designed to collaborate with network simulators. In this paper,
we first introduce a classification of existing methods for the generation
of vehicular mobility models, then we describe the various approaches used
by the community for realistic VANET simulations. Finally, we provide an
overview and comparison of a large range of mobility models proposed for
vehicular ad hoc networks.