Bridging the Gap between Simulation and Experimentation in Vehicular Networks

The Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) currently attract a lot of attention. Many simulators and some testbeds have been proposed to validate new ideas and to guide new theoretical developments. Yet, to this date, simulator tools and testbeds evolve in disjoint research work. We developed Airplug-ns, an open source simulation environment, as a step towards bridging this gap. This environment allows to easily design new protocols, test them on the road in order to obtain real measures as well as study their scalability by simulation. It relies on a software suite dedicated to road experiments as well as add-ons in Network Simulator, allowing to replay the experiments in more complex scenarios without new development.