A new mobility trace for realistic large-scale simulation of bus-based DTNs

Realistic scenarios are essential for the simulation-based evaluation of opportunistic routing protocols in vehicular networks. Synthetically generated scenarios are easy to obtain but fail to reproduce the complexity of the real world. Therefore, the generally accepted procedure is to use traces recorded in experiments. Unfortunately, this is almost impractical for large-scale scenarios. The advancing pervasion of ICT in transportation systems results in new opportunities for the research community to collect mobility traces from real systems. Using the example of one of the world's largest public transportation network, we demonstrate our approach to acquire realistic traces which are more extensive than existing traces. Moreover, we demonstrate how this data can easily be integrated into the established delay tolerant network (DTN) simulation tool 'The ONE'.