Performance comparison of AODV and OLSR in VANETs urban environments under realistic mobility patterns

A Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is an instance of MANETs that establishes wireless connections between cars. In VANETs, routing protocols and other techniques must be adapted to vehicular-specific capabilities and requirements. As many previous works have shown, routing performance is greatly dependent to the availability and stability of wireless links, which makes it a crucial parameter that should not be neglected in order to obtain accurate performance measurements in VANETs. Although routing protocols have already been analyzed and compared in the past, simulations and comparisons have almost always been done considering random motions. But could we assess that those results hold if performed using realistic urban vehicular motion patterns ? In this paper, we evaluate AODV and OLSR performance in realistic urban scenarios. We study those protocols under varying metrics such as node mobility and vehicle density, and with varying traffic rates. We show that clustering effects created by cars aggregating at intersections have remarkable impacts on evaluation and performance metrics. Our objective is to provide a qualitative assessment of the applicability of the protocols in different vehicular scenarios.