CORNER: a step towards realistic simulations for VANET

Abstract

Advances in portable technologies and emergence of new applications stimulate interest in urban vehicular communications for commercial, military, and homeland defense applications. Simulation is an essential tool to study the behavior and evaluate the performance of protocols and applications in large-scale urban vehicular networks. In this paper we propose CORNER a low computational cost yet accurate urban propagation model for mobile networks. CORNER estimates the presence of buildings and obstacles along the signal path using information extrapolated from urban digital maps. A reverse geocoding algorithm is used to classify the propagation situation of any two nodes that need to communicate starting from their geographical coordinates. Sender and Receiver are classified as in Line of Sight if there are no obstacles in between, and as NON in Line of Sight when there are obstacles (i.e. buildings) between them. CORNER has been validated through extensive on-the-road experiments, the results show high accuracy in predicting the network connectivity. In addition, on-the-road experiments suggest the need to refine the fading model to differentiate between Line of Sight, and NON Line of Sight situations. Finally, we show the impact of CORNER on simulation results for widely used applications.