Simulation Tools and Techniques for Vehicular Communications and Applications

In the domain of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), even though first field operational tests are already going on, performance evaluation is still dominated by simulation experiments. Yet, they require a very specific methodology as well as adapted tools and models not straightforwardly found in other domains. In this chapter, we first describe the required methodology in terms of scalability and applicability to select the right models and their interactions. In particular, we classify each class of models as in increasing level of granularity, and discuss in detail the trade-off between scalability and applicability typical to IVC simulations. We then introduce some of the most widely used and openly available simulation frameworks applicable to the domain of IVC, and emphasize their capabilities related to the required methodology. In particular, we present the IVC simulation toolkits Veins, iTETRIS, and VSimRTI, three prominent simulation platforms openly available for IVC simulations. To provide guidelines for efficient and scalable simulations of IVC applications, we discuss the appropriate selection of models and their level of granularity as function of the IVC application requirements, and provide an overview of their corresponding support in each of toolkit.