An Integrated Architecture for Simulation and Modeling of Small- and Medium-Sized Transportation and Communication Networks

The emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) in the past decade has added a level of complexity to the modelling of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. In this paper, the Vehicular Network Integrated Simulator (VNetIntSim) is introduced as a new transportation network and VANET simulation tool by integrating transportation and VANET modelling. Specifically, it integrates the OPNET software, a communication network simulator, and the INTEGRATION software, a microscopic traffic simulation software. The INTEGRATION software simulates the movement of travellers and vehicles, while the OPNET software models the data exchange through the communication system. Information is exchanged between the two simulators as needed. The paper describes the implementation and the operation details of the VNetIntSim as well as the features it supports such as multiclass support and vehicle reuse. Subsequently, VNetIntSim is used to quantify the impact of mobility parameters (vehicular traffic stream speed and density) on the communication system performance considering Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) applications. Specifically, the routing performance (packet drops and route discovery time), IP processing delay in case of a file transfer protocol (FTP) application, and jitter in case of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) application and evaluated.