Real world factors-based simulation for improving reliability of vehicular communications

Abstract

Currently, vehicles are making our life easier and more convenient. However, there are many traffic jams every day and the number of accidents is on the increase. Vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) is a high speed mobile network that enables various application services for driver safety and traffic flow improvement. It has low reliability in multi-hop communication environment. The major causes for this are link breakage and increased transmission delay due to high moving speed of vehicles and frequent change in topology for maintaining a communication network. To improve the reliability of VANET routing protocols, many studies have been carried out but to apply the findings from these studies for practical purposes in the real world, many problems still exist. It is because existing simulators only evaluate network performance such as packet delivery rate, packet delay, and throughput via numerical method. Therefore, the real world factors such as road patterns and traffic signal system are not taken into account in existing NS-2 simulation. However, the real world factors are very import in vehicle communication environment because it decided vehicle velocity, vehicle density and network topology. These are important factors influencing the performance of the protocol. Therefore, this paper proposes a new simulation method based on the real world factors to improve reliability of VANET routing protocols. We experimented to demonstrate the performance differences between the proposed simulation and only NS-2 simulation on existing VANET routing protocols.