Vehicular Network Simulation Environment via Discrete Event System Modeling

A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) enables vehicles to communicate with each other directly or via roadside infrastructure in order to improve road safety and efficiency. Within a VANET, communications can potentially alter vehicular mobility and conversely, that the mobility could potentially influence vehicular communications. Therefore, a VANET simulator environment is needed that can accurately model interactions between vehicular mobility and network protocols. In this paper, we present a novel vehicular network simulation environment designed using the MATLAB discrete event system (DES) in the SimEvents toolbox. The proposed simulation environment is a bit-accurate, discrete event simulator that integrates vehicular mobility operations with wireless network communication. This paper provides details on the design of the proposed simulator. Its computational costs are evaluated in terms of events quantities and execution time. The physical (PHY) layer of the proposed simulator shows a more realistic packet success rate (PSR) using bit-level processing techniques when compared with the packet-based NS-3 simulator. The performance of the priority-based media access control (MAC) layer proves the data with different priorities that can coexist in the same channel.