Using Real-World Car Traffic Dataset in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Performance Evaluation

Vehicular ad hoc networking is an emerging paradigm which is gaining much interest with the development of new topics such as the connected vehicle, the autonomous vehicle, and also new high-speed mobile communication technologies such as 802.11p and LTE-D. This paper presents a brief review of different mobility models used for evaluating performance of routing protocols and applications designed for vehicular ad hoc networks. Particularly, it describes how accurate mobility traces can be built from a real-world car traffic dataset that embeds the main characteristics affecting vehicle-to-vehicle communications. An effective use of the proposed mobility models is illustrated in various road traffic conditions involving communicating vehicles equipped with 802.11p. This study shows that such dataset actually contains additional information that cannot completely be obtained with other analytical or simulated mobility models, while impacting the results of performance evaluation in vehicular ad hoc networks. Keywords—MOCoPo dataset; mobility models; vehicular ad hoc networks; simulation; performance evaluation