Automesh: Flexible Simulation Framework for Vehicular Communication

Vehicular communication is an emerging technology that has lot of potential to support transportation safety, traffic information and other ITS related applications. Due to its unique challenges and infrastructure requirements it is very difficult to evaluate new communication technologies in real world. A good simulation environment is required to evaluate new technologies in close to real-world situations. It is very difficult to integrate real world scenarios like driving and vehicular mobility in widely used network simulators like NS-2 and Qualnet. This paper discusses these requirements for vehicular communication simulation and provides a new architecture for flexible simulation framework for vehicular networks. Proposed simulation architecture combines network simulation, driving simulation and propagation simulation by using real geographic road network and digital elevation model (DEM) to accurately simulate vehicular communication with realistic mobility, accurate propagation models and precise communication models. Proposed simulation framework provides plug-in type modules to extend the features for a particular technology, whether it is communication protocol or driver safety system and evaluates the results inside complete system. Also presented a simple scenario to show how different modules can be extended based on the simulation requirements