Enhancing the ns-3 simulator by introducing Electric Vehicles features

Electric Vehicles (EVs) sales are increasing in the recent years due to several factors such as cost reduction, fuel cost increase, pollution reductions, government incentives, among others. At the same time, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are continuously improving, and researchers use different simulators in order to test their proposals before implementing them in real devices. However, traditional communications-aimed simulations do not include fuel consumption issues that are a key factor in transportation systems. This paper presents the addition of Electric Vehicles consumption to the ns-3 simulator, which currently is one of the most used network simulators. Our proposal follows all the models, coding style, as well as engineering guidelines of ns-3, coupled with the characteristics of each vehicle, to accurately estimate the energy consumption. We also analyze the performance of our proposal while simulating a part of the E313 highway, located in Antwerp, Belgium. In particular, we compare the ns-3 results obtained in terms of energy consumption to those obtained in SUMO. In addition, we study the impact of our proposal on the overall simulation time.