A realistic simulation framework for vehicular networks

Research in Vehicular Networks (VNs) has found in simulation the most useful method to test new algorithms and techniques. This is mainly due to the high cost of deploying such systems in real scenarios. When simulating vehicular environments, two different issues must be addressed: mobility and wireless communications. Regarding mobility, several mobility pattern generators have been proposed so far. However, all of them present important drawbacks from the point of view of reproducing realistic mobility over real roadmaps. As for the wireless communications, ns-2 has become one of the most widely used network simulators for wireless communications researchers. However, simulating VNs requires using environments behaving as realistically as possible, and ns-2 presents some deficiencies that make it difficult to obtain accurate vehicular simulations. In this work, we present a realistic simulation framework which combines vehicular mobility over real roadmaps and ns-2 optimizations to obtain more accurate and meaningful results when simulating vehicular environments.