Generation of realistic traces for vehicular mobility simulations

Abstract

Realistic vehicular traces are necessary in reliable VANETs simulations in order to evaluate protocols and applications designed for new technology. Because of the complexity of traffic behaviours, the generation of vehicular traces is one of the biggest challenges in VANETs research. This paper consolidates the current state-of-the art on vehicular mobility generators into three aspects: mobility models, traffic demand model and route assignment method as well as provide and overview of existing generators. The main part of the paper focuses on the improvement of traces generated by the VehiLux model over the city of Luxembourg. The quality of a large set of traces is assessed by the means of realistic traffic simulation and a proposed fitness metric. The influence of the implementation of the Gawron's algorithm---route assignment method on the quality of generated traces is evaluated.