Geo-Social Mobility Model for VANET Simulation

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a special case of opportunistic network where nodes are moving vehicles communicating together through short range wireless transmission. VANET applications vary from safety and accident avoidance to leisure and entertainment. The data dissemination routine differs according to the delay tolerance of the application. The bandwidth usage of the application is directly proportional to the priority of the sent traffic and accordingly the routing protocols vary. Simulation is a key feature in validating the protocols dedicated for VANET applications. Since the vehicles mobility is driven by the human mobility characteristics and is controlled by the geographical restrictions of the roads, the work presented in this paper is aimed to having a realistic mobility model that incorporates both the social aspects of human mobility together with the geographical restrictions that governs the movement of the mobile nodes. This mobility model is for testing the protocols related to the delay tolerant applications where unicasting/multicasting is used for data dissemination rather than broadcasting. Thus location awareness and destination prediction is essential. The model is based on using realistic data sets rather than randomly generated data.