Vehicular mobility simulation with VanetMobiSim

During the last few years, continuous progresses in wireless communications have opened new research fields in computer networking, aimed at extending data networks connectivity to environments where wired solutions are impracticable. Among these, vehicular communication is attracting growing attention from both academia and industry, owing to the amount and importance of the related applications, ranging from road safety to traffic control and up to mobile entertainment. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are self-organized networks built up from moving vehicles, and are part of the broader class of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Owing to their peculiar characteristics, VANETs require the definition of specific networking techniques, whose feasibility and performance are usually tested by means of simulation. One of the main challenges posed by VANETs simulations is the faithful characterization of vehicular mobility at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels, leading to realistic non-uniform distributions of cars and velocity, and unique connectivity dynamics. However, freely distributed tools which are commonly used for academic studies only consider limited vehicular mobility issues, while they pay little or no attention to vehicular traffic generation and its interaction with its motion constraints counterpart. Such a simplistic approach can easily raise doubts on the confidence of derived VANETs simulation results. In this paper we present VanetMobiSim, a freely available generator of realistic vehicular movement traces for networks simulators. The traces generated by VanetMobiSim are validated first by illustrating how the interaction between featured motion constraints and traffic generator models is able to reproduce typical phenomena of vehicular traffic. Then, the traces are formally validated against those obtained by TSIS-CORSIM, a benchmark traffic simulator in transportation research. This makes VanetMobiSim one of the few vehicular mobility simulator fully validated and freely available to the vehicular networks research community.