Design and Implementation of a Scenario-Based Communication Model for VANETs in EXata

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a promising area of research and development as it has remarkable role in improving safety of vehicles on road, efficient traffic management, and providing comfort to commuters. The typical characteristics of VANET environment pose several challenges for VANET application developers. There is always a demand for scalable communication mechanisms suitable for low- and high-speed vehicles, information dissemination techniques that suit sparse and dense traffic conditions. Thus, the reliability of any VANET application strongly depends upon the robustness of the underlying communication architecture. Any VANET communication model shall strictly adhere to the wireless access standards and specifications laid down for vehicular communications. In this work, we have designed and implemented a basic VANET communication model that facilitates both Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication adhering to IEEE 802.11p standards. The Physical and Link Layer extensions of WAVE standard have been integrated to EXata5.1 (network emulator) to support IEEE 802.11p communication. Necessary Graphical User Interface and library level extensions were made to create VANET scenarios. To demonstrate and evaluate our communication model, urban scenarios with different node densities were created in EXata. The communication scenarios were emulated with predefined mobility of nodes, CBR as the traffic application and Bellman Ford as the default routing protocol. Using EXata analyzer, the performance metrics were analyzed and found that our basic VANET communication model offers good throughput at high vehicle densities with a soft delay constraint.