Comparing apples and oranges?: trends in IVC simulations

Looking back at recent years in Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) research, tremendous improvements in precision and realism of simulation models concerning all its aspects can be observed. These models offer a vast number of parameters, enabling investigations of a huge variety of different scenarios. Reviewing simulation studies published at major vehicular network conferences from 2009 to 2011, we reflect on the impact of these developments. We are glad to present a clear trend to conduct simulations based on a consolidated set of established standards, models, and tools. However, looking at individual papers, we commonly find key information (such as the used model) missing. We argue that this trend threatens to compromise both the reproducibility and the comparability of simulations conducted, but acknowledge that space constraints often make it impossible to describe current, complex simulations in full. We hope that the presented commonly used basic building blocks of simulations can serve as first step towards deriving an agreed-upon set to base IVC simulations on and, thus, ultimately, help keep future research reproducible and comparable.