Bidirectionally Coupled Network and Road Traffic Simulation for Improved IVC Analysis

TLDR

Recent work has focused on efficient Inter‑Vehicle Communication protocols for on‑demand route planning and safety, yet practical experiments are rarely feasible, making realistic network‑traffic simulation essential and highlighting the influence of mobility models on results. This study aims to demonstrate the necessity of bidirectionally coupling network simulation with road‑traffic microsimulation to evaluate IVC protocols. To this end, the authors created Veins, a hybrid framework that integrates the OMNeT++ network simulator with the SUMO traffic simulator. A proof‑of‑concept evaluation of two incident‑warning protocols shows that the coupled approach improves performance assessment and enables more accurate IVC protocol evaluation.

Abstract

Recently, many efforts have been made to develop more efficient Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocols for on-demand route planning according to observed traffic congestion or incidents, as well as for safety applications. Because practical experiments are often not feasible, simulation of network protocol behavior in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) scenarios is strongly demanded for evaluating the applicability of developed network protocols. In this work, we discuss the need for bidirectional coupling of network simulation and road traffic microsimulation for evaluating IVC protocols. As the selection of a mobility model influences the outcome of simulations to a great extent, the use of a representative model is necessary for producing meaningful evaluation results. Based on these observations, we developed the hybrid simulation framework Veins (Vehicles in Network Simulation), composed of the network simulator OMNeT++ and the road traffic simulator SUMO. In a proof-of-concept study, we demonstrate its advantages and the need for bidirectionally coupled simulation based on the evaluation of two protocols for incident warning over VANETs. With our developed methodology, we can advance the state-of-the-art in performance evaluation of IVC and provide means to evaluate developed protocols more accurately.