Development of a Motorway Simulator for Vehicular Multimedia Communications

To provision various multimedia communication services with guaranteed quality to motorway drivers and future autonomous vehicles, substantial work is required to analyze the characteristics of vehicular traffic profiles on the motorways. To this end, in this paper, we first analyze some real vehicular traffic data taken from an inductive loop on the motorway ´M4´ in Wales over the last 5 years, and then developed our own simulator to simulate various vehicular traffic scenarios where vehicles access a wireless local area network (WLAN) base station (BS) to send or receive multimedia traffic. The access to the base station is managed by a modified version of the packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) protocol (Goodman, 1989) which we have integrated into the simulator. Finally we introduce an analytical model for this medium access control (MAC) protocol to evaluate the quality-of-service (QoS) required for multimedia traffic.