Evaluating VANET Performance Using ns-3

Although inter-vehicle communications (IVC) technologies intend to improve driving safety and enable infotainment applications, empirical testing within large-scale deployments remains cost-prohibitive, thus highlighting the need for accurate simulation models. While using current models, simulation practitioners limit future extensions and produce inconsistent results by choosing different design assumptions, thus motivating the following research objective: the goal of this research is to assess VANET network effectiveness by highly parameterizing in simulation mobility, radio propagation, and MAC/PHY models that realistically represent VANET scenarios. We develop a simulation script for ns-3 that we execute for several realistic VANET scenarios and compare routing throughput, end-to-end delay, and safety message packet delivery ratio (PDR) to assess routing protocol performance of AODV, DSDV, OLSR, and DSR. We find that by combining synthetic highway or realistic vehicular traces with parametric sensitivity, VANET network and routing protocol performance can be meaningfully assessed.