Rapid Generation of Realistic Mobility Models for VANET

TLDR

Vehicular ad‑hoc networks (VANETs) use vehicles as mobile nodes, but high deployment costs force most research to rely on simulations, making realistic vehicular mobility models essential for valid results. The authors introduce MOVE, a tool that enables rapid generation of realistic mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE, built on the SUMO micro‑traffic simulator, produces realistic mobility models that can be directly imported into network simulators such as ns‑2 and QualNet, and the authors evaluate routing performance against the random waypoint model. Simulations using MOVE’s realistic mobility models yield routing performance markedly different from that obtained with the random waypoint model.

Abstract

One emerging, new type of ad-hoc network is the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), in which vehicles constitute the mobile nodes in the network. Due to the prohibitive cost of deploying and implementing such a system in real world, most research in VANET relies on simulations for evaluation. A key component for VANET simulations is a realistic vehicular mobility model that ensures conclusions drawn from simulation experiments will carry through to real deployments. In this work, we introduce a tool MOVE that allows users to rapidly generate realistic mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE is built on top of an open source micro-traffic simulator SUMO. The output of MOVE is a realistic mobility model and can be immediately used by popular network simulators such as ns-2 and qualnet. We evaluate and compare ad-hoc routing performance for vehicular nodes using MOVE to that using the random waypoint model. We show that the simulation results obtained when nodes moving according to a realistic mobility model is significantly different from that of the commonly used random waypoint model.