Rapid generation of realistic mobility models for VANET

One emerging, new type of ad-hoc network is the Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), in which vehicles constitute the mobile nodes in the network. Due to the prohibitive cost of deploying and implementing such a system in real world, most research in VANET relies on simulations for evaluation. A key component for VANET simulations is a realistic vehicular mobility model that ensures conclusions drawn from simulation experiments will carry through to real deployments. In this work, we introduce a tool MOVE that allows users to rapidly generate realistic mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE is built on top of an open source micro-traffic simulator SUMO. The output of MOVE is a realistic mobility model and can be immediately used by popular network simulators such as ns-2 and qualnet. We evaluate and compare ad-hoc routing performance for vehicular nodes using MOVE to that using the random waypoint model. We show that the simulation results obtained when nodes moving according to a realistic mobility model is significantly different from that of the commonly used random waypoint model.