Simulator for inter-vehicle communication based on traffic modeling

In order to increase security in road traffic, driver assistance systems became an important topic in research. For these systems inter-vehicle communication is very promising as it can serve the systems with additional information. Therefore, communication protocols and routing strategies are needed to distribute information between vehicles. These have to be tested in large networks provided by a simulation tool that models the movement of vehicles on a road network and can be used as a platform for testing different communication protocols. The movement of vehicles is described in various traffic models. These models normally aim at the examination of traffic dynamics, and so a proper model for the purpose of inter-vehicle communication has to be chosen. It has to give the possibility to add a communication stack for the single nodes and to concern different effects of wireless communication and mobile ad-hoc networks. In this paper, a concept for such a simulation tool is presented, which is based on a traffic simulation that models the movement of vehicles. Besides this, it becomes possible to implement various communication layers to simulate different effects of communication protocols.