Content area
Allowing a vehicle on road to communicate real-time information on speed, braking and lane changing activities with other vehicles can help avoid accidents and traffic congestion. Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a network that involves moving vehicles within certain range of distance to communicate with each other, thus forming a network. A VANET turns every participating vehicle into a wireless router or node that allows them to communicate with each other. Although, a VANET provides safety measures and improves traffic efficiency, they are highly expensive to be used by all vehicles on roads.
Several VANET simulators have been developed to imitate the activities that occur in a VANET at reduced cost. Majority of these VANET simulators are either categorized into road traffic or network simulators. Most of the existing road traffic simulators concentrates on analyzing real-life traffic patterns of vehicles such as, speed, lane changing, halt and proceed. A traffic simulator is used to monitor understand traffic pattern, reduce real-life traffic congestion. On the other hand, network simulators concentrate on the state and event of network such as routers, mobile nodes and its transmission rate. The purpose of network simulator is to examine the performance ad hoc routing protocols. The integration of traffic and network simulator provides communication between on road vehicles and wireless network.
In this thesis, several existing VANET simulators and their features are discussed. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the performance of a previously developed VANET traffic and network simulator. Integrating Network Simulator -2 (NS2) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) developed the VANET simulator of research interest to measure various performance metrics such as, Packet Delivery Ratio (PRD), End-End-Delay (EED), packet loss and throughput to increase the traffic efficiency.