VANET simulators: an updated review

Julia Silva Weber,Tiago Ferreto,Miguel Neves

doi:10.1186/s13173-021-00113-x

Abstract

Research on VANETs (vehicular ad hoc networks) date back to the beginning of the 2000s. The possibility of enabling communication between vehicles through a wireless network stimulated the creation of new protocols, devices, and diverse utilization scenarios. Due to the intrinsic difficulties of using a real testbed to evaluate these research contributions, several simulators were developed at the time. Recently, with the advent of autonomous vehicles and the emergence of novel technologies (e.g., 5G and edge computing), new research challenges on VANETs are coming into sight. Therefore, revisiting VANET simulators is required to identify if they are still capable of evaluating these new scenarios. This paper presents an updated review of VANET simulators, showing their current state and capabilities to assess novel scenarios in VANET research. Based on this analysis, we identify open research challenges that should be addressed in current and future VANET simulators.

Highlights

Intelligent vehicles are a developing technology with promising future
To take the first steps in that direction, we list and discuss many research challenges we found during our investigations, which range from performance issues to lack of support for current standards
While VANET is not directly correlated to Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication, NetSim provides the source-code for user modification, which could be used to future experimentation in VANET cases. Both Netsim and Eclipse MOSAIC, despite having useful elements that seem promising for combining UAV communication with VANET, present a lack of research in this area

Summary

Introduction

Intelligent vehicles are a developing technology with promising future. to guarantee such technology to be safe, vehicles need to be able to communicate with each other and exchange information in real time. Simulators must be able to model the novel technologies penetrating the VANET space (e.g., SDN, edge computing,and 5G) and provide support for safety and We provide an updated review on VANET simulators, presenting their main features and current support for novel technologies.

Results

Conclusion