Performance of topology-based data routing with regard to radio connectivity in VANET

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are characterized by the rapidly changing topology and then a frequent network disruption. Hence, connectivity of moving vehicles presents an important challenge that critically influences the data transmission. Furthermore, data delivery ratio depends on routing protocols, applications type as well as environment characteristics. As a matter of fact, real experimentation in vehicular networks are costly and hard to deploy especially on large scale. Consequently, a vehicular mobility simulator is a good compromise to study how efficient are the data transmission mechanisms. In this paper, we comprehensively study the impact of the radio connectivity on data communication in vehicular networks. The analysis were realized based on a vehicular mobility simulator which runs a realistic scenario of mobility traffic in a real urban environment. A simple scenario of a safety application was implemented to examine the behavior of three well-known topology-based routing protocols. For the purpose of the analysis, we varied the simulation setup such as the density and the data traffic rate to determine the impact of the connectivity. The simulation results show that a realistic modelling of radio propagation has an important role in data transmission.