A flexible testbed architecture for VANET

Verification of VANET applications and protocols is a challenging task due to its unique mobility, driver behavior and networking requirements. Although network simulators are widely used for network performance evaluation, there is a lack of a realistic testbed that is capable of emulating the VANET environment, enabling user testing and evaluating both Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). This article studies the requirements of such a testbed and introduces a flexible VANET testbed architecture that is tailored for VANET applications' needs. The implementation of this architecture is tested using standard VANET applications to evaluate its feasibility for vehicular applications. Our results confirm the suitability of the proposed testbed to meet VANET requirements. Furthermore, the effect of adding a caching entity is experimented and the results show its ability to mitigate the testbed's overhead. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.