Tool to simulate groups in vehicular networks using NS-2 and TraceGraph

The main goal of Vehicular Ad-Hoc NETworks (VANETs) is to improve safety, efficiency and comfort in everyday road travel. The communication quality in these networks is highly degraded when the number of vehicles is very large in a small geographic area or when vehicles do not cooperate in packet forwarding. Groups are here proposed to avoid these problems by decreasing the number of packets sent among vehicles and by encouraging collaboration in packet forwarding. A fundamental problem in the study of Peer-TO-Peer (P2P) networks is the evaluation of new proposals. This paper presents GroVAN, a simulation framework for vehicular P2P networks that allows doing comparative studies between VANETs that follow a group-based approach and others that do not use groups. GroVAN is implemented in TCL and runs in NS-2 using SUMO for node mobility and TraceGraph for graphics.