Different Strokes for Different Folks: An Evaluation of Road Networks and their Impact on VANET Mobility

Abstract

The majority of communication protocols for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have only been verified via simulations which used synthetic mobility models such as random waypoint or random direction. It is clear that such models do not reflect the specific nature of car movement. Specialized mobility models which try to model all characteristics of realistic car movement, e.g. different sizes and car types, driver behaviour, driving lanes, acceleration and traffic lights, provide higher accuracy but are usually too detailed to be practicable for network simulations.

In this work we introduce our event-driven vehicular mobility model (EVIMO) which considers the most important aspects of car mobility without the need of high computational power. Furthermore, we show that the structure of the road map is the dominating factor by discussing the results for different characteristic types of cities.