Modeling and Simulation of Vehicular Networks: Towards Realistic and Efficient Models

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been envisioned with three types of applications in mind: safety, traffic management, and commercial applications. By using wireless interfaces to form an ad hoc network, vehicles will be able to inform other vehicles about traffic accidents, hazardous road conditions and traffic congestion. Commercial applications (e.g., data exchange, audio/video communication) are envisioned to provide incentive for faster adoption of the technology. To date, the majority of VANET research efforts have relied heavily on simulations, due to prohibitive costs of employing real world testbeds. Current VANET simulators have gone a long way from the early VANET simulation environments, which often assumed unrealistic models such as random waypoint mobility, circular transmission range, or interference-free environment (Kotz et al. (2004)). However, significant efforts still remain in order to enhance the realism of VANET simulators, at the same time providing a computationally inexpensive and efficient platform for performance evaluation of VANETs. In this work, we distinguish three key building blocks of VANET simulators: