A Survey on Mobility Models for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular networking is an emerging area of interest in the wireless networking community as well as in the transportation research community. Vehicular ad hoc networks (vanet) are distributed, self-organizing communication networks which progressed from traveling vehicles, and are thus characterized by very high speeds and limited degrees of freedom in node (vehicle) movement patterns. Different mobility models in vehicular ad hoc networks significantly affect the performance of several mobility management protocols. These mobility models imply vehicular movement pattern, street layout, trip selection scheme, path selection scheme, destination selection mechanism, and traffic control mechanism. Therefore a good realistic mobility model is an essential component to evaluate the performance of vanet.