Evaluation of VANET-based Advanced Intelligent Transportation Systems

This paper aims at enabling accurate and efficient evaluation of emerging vehicular network applications such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). A distributed simulation platform that integrates transportation simulation and wireless network simulation is proposed and implemented, providing a user level simulation environment to evaluate the feasibility and performance limitations of VANETs in supporting ITS. The proposed simulation platform facilitates the dynamic interaction between the two simulation domains, allowing runtime control of vehicles' behavior in the transportation simulation as they react in real time to information exchange in the simulated communication network. Case studies are conducted within the proposed simulation platform to evaluate the performance of Dynamic Route Planning when deployed in VANETs, using metrics collected at the transportation system level such as travel and delay time. The effectiveness of three representative VANET dynamic adaptation protocols in enhancing the application performance in scenarios with high vehicle density are compared in the case studies. The experiment results show that Dynamic Route Planning can be effectively supported by a VANET system with up to 118% increase on the number of vehicles reaching the destination, 36.2% reduction on travel time and 56.1% reduction on delay time.