A Generalized Framework for Integrated Vehicle Traffic and Wireless Network Simulation

This paper presents a generalized framework for integrating a wireless network simulator and a vehicle traffic simulator for rapid prototyping and evaluation of Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) based vehicular communication protocols and their applications in the context of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). A novel method of inter-simulator time synchronization has been designed to simulate the interactions between vehicles and wireless networks at resolutions of up to few tens of milliseconds. This fine grain time synchronization enables the simulation of time-critical ITS safety applications requiring less than 100 ms timing resolutions. The architecture-driven approach that has been adopted further leads to a generalized integration that is agnostic of the specific internal syntaxes used by the individual communication network and vehicle simulators that are being integrated. As a feasibility demonstration, the framework is used to integrate Paramics, a vehicular traffic simulator, with ns-2, a communication network simulator. The resulting integrated simulator is then utilized to investigate the performance of wireless message propagation in the context of a freeway car collision avoidance application.