Impact of realistic mobility models on the performance of VANET routing protocols

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a special class of ad hoc networks, wherein vehicles integrated with computing and communication capabilities exchange information among themselves and the roadside units through wireless media. Vehicular communication plays a vital role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), especially to ensure safety and traffic management. Further, VANET communication finds wide application in autonomous driving systems. With the massive increase in the number of vehicles being used and prevailing complex traffic conditions, designing routing protocols for efficient communication in VANETs has become more challenging and captured the attention of the research community. In the process of developing new routing protocols, it is prohibitively expensive to deploy real-world test beds to analyze the efficiency of new protocols against the existing ones. Hence, research in vehicular communication greatly depends on simulation. Due to the highly dynamic nature of vehicles in real-time traffic environments, an appropriate choice of mobility models that accurately reflect real-world traffic behavior has a greater impact in the study on performance analysis of VANET routing protocols. In view of this, this paper explores the impact of the most commonly used realistic mobility models on the performance of VANET routing protocols, under varied real-world traffic scenarios. The performance of different routing protocols is compared with respect to the QoS metrics, namely, average goodput, MacPhy overhead, and BSM packet delivery ratio. Simulators such as Network Simulator 3 (NS3) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) were used to conduct the experiment.