A survey and comparative study of simulators for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

Abstract

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.

From Delay-Tolerant Networks to Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks

“…If ITS functionalities are really required, either they are implemented in the ONE simulator or DTN protocols are implemented in NCTUns. A more complete survey of VANET simulators is available in [39].…”

Comparative Study of Vehicular Ad-hoc Network Mobility Models and Simulators

“…Most widely used mobility simulators are TSIS-CORSIM [11], VISSIM [11], PARAMICS [11], SmartAHS [11], Microscopic Traffic Applet [11], CannuMobiSim [11] and VanetMobiSim [12], SUMO [12], FreeSim [12], and CityMob [12].…”

“…Most widely used network simulators are NS-2 [11,12], OPNET [11], GloMoSim [12], J-Sim [11], GTNetS [12], and SWANS [11].…”

“…Depending on a given application context, the software that allows one to change the behaviour of vehicles is known as an integrated framework or a VANET simulator. In this section, there is a discussion on mainly four VANET simulators, namely GrooveNet [11], TraNS (Traffic and Network simulation Environment) [11], MobiREAL [12], NCTUns (National Chicago Tung University Network Simulator) [12].…”

Modeling and Simulation of Vehicular Networks: towards Realistic and Efficient Models

“…Several other studies (Jerbi et al (2007), Wu et al (2005), Matolak et al (2005), and Vehicle Safety Communications Project, Final Report (2006)) hint that other vehicles apart from the transmitter and receiver could be an important factor in modeling the signal propagation by obstructing the LOS between the communicating vehicles. Despite this, virtually all of the state-of-the-art VANET simulators consider the vehicles as dimensionless entities that have no influence on signal propagation (Martinez et al (2009)). This motivated our study on the impact of vehicles as obstacles on V2V communication described in Boban et al (2011) and presented in the next section.…”