Synthesizing Realistic Vehicular Mobility for More Precise Simulation of Inter-vehicle Communication

Recently many researches about transmission of traffic information among vehicles by using inter-vehicle communication without any load side infrastructures have been studied. In order to evaluate performance of such inter-vehicle communication, traffic simulators are widely used. However, in most of existing traffic simulators, distance between two following vehicles is modeled as equals based on statistical flow rates. Such mobility models do not reflect real performance of inter-vehicle communication, In this paper, we extract particular characteristics of real vehicular mobility from several traces of vehicular movement, formulate them formally, implement the formulated realistic vehicular mobility on an existing traffic simulator and obtain more real performance of inter-vehicle communication. In the extracted vehicular mobility, each vehicle runs at a different speed, with different distance from the vehicle ahead, and with different vehicular density/distribution while the bottleneck capacity and saturation flow rate of the target roads are preserved as the same as those on the original one. We have shown that performance of inter-vehicle communication is rather different between the proposed mobility and original mobility by evaluating the reachable hop counts of multi-hop communication and performance of the DSR protocol.