Using large-scale field test data for high fidelity modeling of DSRC receiver in ns-3.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V) has attracted the interest of research community in recent years because of its potential to increase safety and efficiency of roads and make connected-vehicles a reality. DSRC-based vehicular networks are already standardized by IEEE 802.11 which supports communication among vehicles and road-side infrastructures. However, before deployment, different safety applications need to be tested and validated for numerous road scenarios to show the benefit of DSRC-based networks. Since large-scale field tests are expensive to conduct for vehicular networks, researchers mostly depend on simulation tools that come in handy where a sizable number of tests are required to substantiate the performance of safety applications. ns-3 is such a network simulation tool that offers a rich set of libraries for modeling mobility, communication channel, and many other network components. Although ns-3 is specially designed for simulating Wi-Fi networks, some enhancements are still required to make the simulations more realistic for vehicular networks. Large-scale field tests reveal that some of the substantial details are missing in existing ns-3 implementation of physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers that play a major role in defining the network behavior. Since safety applications are implemented at the top layer of the DSRC protocol stack, reliability of their performance largely depends on how well the lower layers are simulated