Flow-Level Simulation for Adaptive Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Adaptive routing reacts to a varying connected vehicle density by switching between different routing techniques (e.g. from Instant routing under high densities to delay-tolerant routing under low densities). These adaptations take place over large scales of time and space which makes their simulation challenging computationally. Flow-level simulators can address such challenges by using the right level of abstraction. In this paper, we present a flexible and extendable flow-level simulation environment for adaptive routing protocols in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs). We discuss in details the different networking and mobility modules involved using rigorous mathematical modeling. We use MATLAB as the language of choice which allows researchers to utilize our environment while harnessing MATLAB's statistics and machine learning libraries. Such sophisticated libraries are a critical toolbox for adaptive routing protocol researchers. To the best of our knowledge, no such simulator has been publicly accessible so far.