VaSili - A simulation runtime environment for applications in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

In recent years, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have become a very active research field. Since real-world experiments might involve potentially costly and complex hardware installations, simulations are a widely used alternative. However, due to, e.g., different scopes of functionality of available VANET simulators, simulations of VANET applications yield different results when using different simulators. Thus, it would be beneficial to test a VANET application in multiple simulation environments. Unfortunately, VANET applications are typically implemented inside of a certain simulator. Hence, to switch the simulator, the source code of the application has to be adapted. To solve this problem, we developed a VANET API which defines the structure and interfaces of crucial VANET components to make them accessible in a unified way. We further developed VANET Simulation Runtime (VaSili), a framework which allows executing VANET API-compliant VANET applications in different VANET simulators without modification. Hence, applications developed using our proposed API can be run in different simulation environments and, since the VANET API is independent of VaSili, on real hardware.