Performance evaluation of routing protocols using NS-2 and realistic traces on driving simulator

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)With the rapid growth in wireless mobile communication technology, Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has emerged as a promising method to effectively solve transportation-related issues. So far, most of researches on VANETs have been conducted with simulations as the real-world experiment is expensive. A core problem affecting the fidelity of simulation is the mobility model employed. In this thesis, a sophisticated traffic simulator capable of generating realistic vehicle traces is introduced. Combined with network simulator NS-2, we used this tool to evaluate the general performance of several routing protocols and studied the impact of intersections on simulation results. We show that static nodes near the intersection tend to become more active in packet delivery with higher transferred throughput