Performance Evaluation of VANET Under Realistic Vehicular Traffic Assumption

Summary Vehicle-to-vehicle communication has become a very challenging topic in recent years. Vehicles equipped with devices capable of short-range wireless connectivity can form a mobile ad hoc network, called a Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET). In such networks, two vehicles which are not in the radio range of each other can communicate by using other vehicles as relay. Our work focuses on the efficiency of routing algorithm in VANET. A routing algorithm is a distributed algorithm used by the nodes to learn the route to potential destinations. There exists standardized routing protocols designed for ad-hoc networks. VANET is a particular ad hoc network where the nodes (vehicles) move very fast. This introduces a high dynamism in the network topology which is difficult to manage. So, we compare the performances of different existing routing protocols in this context. We use two different simulators. The first is a traffic simulator which emulates the vehicular traffic on a highway. It uses microscopic simulations. The second is a network simulator (NS2) which simulates all the protocols (wifi, IP, UDP and the routing protocols) used by the nodes to communicate. The simulations show that reactive protocols are most efficient compared with geographical routing in a VANET. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 1, we present the microscopic traffic simulator. We present the network simulator and simulation parameters in Section 2. Different routing protocols are presented in Section 3. The simulation results are discussed in Section 4.