Effects of Preferred Routes and Destinations on the Performance of Vehicular Network

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET), in which vehicles constitute the mobile nodes in the network, have attracted increasing interest in both academia and industry. However, due to the prohibitive cost of deploying and implementing such a system in the real world, most of the related research relies on simulations for evaluation purposes. A key component for VANET simulations is a realistic vehicular mobility model, as this ensures that the conclusions drawn from simulation experiments will carry through to the real deployments. Node mobility in a vehicular network is strongly affected by the driving behavior such as route choices. While route choice models have been extensively studied in the transportation community, as far as we know, the effects of preferred route and destination on vehicular network simulations have not been discussed much in the networking literature. In this work, we set out to understand the effect of route choices on vehicular network simulation. We also discuss how different destination selection models affect two practical ITS application scenarios: traffic monitoring and event broadcasting. We conclude that selecting a sufficient level of detail in the simulations, such as modeling of route choices, is critical for evaluating VANET protocol design.