Wireless communication technologies have now greatly impact our daily lives. From indoor wireless LANs to outdoor cellular mobile networks, wireless technologies have benefited billions of users around the globe. The era of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is now evolving, gaining attention and momentum. Researchers and developers have built VANET simulation software to allow the study and evaluation of various media access, routing, and emergency warning protocols. VANET simulation is fundamentally different from MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) simulation because in VANETs, vehicular environment imposes new issues and requirements, such as constrained road topology, multi-path fading and roadside obstacles, traffic flow models, trip models, varying vehicular speed and mobility, traffic lights, traffic congestion, drivers' behavior, etc. Currently, there are VANET mobility generators, network simulators, and VANET simulators. This paper presents a comprehensive study and comparisons of the various publicly available VANET simulation software and their components. In particular, we contrast their software characteristics, graphical user interface (GUI), popularity, ease of use, input requirements, output visualization capability, accuracy of simulation, etc. Finally, while each of the studied simulators provides a good simulation environment for VANETs, refinements and further contributions are needed before they can be widely used by the research community.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Currently, the number of vehicles increases every year, raising the probability of having accidents. When an accident occurs, wireless technologies enable vehicles to share warning messages with other vehicles by using vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, and with the emergency services by using vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. Regarding vehicle to infrastructure communications, Road Side Units (RSUs) act similarly to wireless LAN access points, and can provide communications with the infrastructure. Since RSUs are usually very expensive to install, authorities limit their number, especially in suburbs and areas of sparse population, making RSUs a precious resource in vehicular environments. In this paper, we propose a Density-based Road Side Unit deployment policy (D-RSU), specially designed to obtain an efficient system with the lowest possible cost to alert emergency services in case of an accident. Our approach is based on deploying RSUs using an inverse proportion to the expected density of vehicles. The obtained results shows how D-RSU is able to reduce the required number of RSUs, as well as the accident notification time. Index TermsVehicular networks, Road Side Unit, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, road safety.