Vehicular networks on two Madrid highways

Abstract

There is a growing need for vehicular mobility datasets that can be employed in the simulative evaluation of protocols and architectures designed for upcoming vehicular networks. Such datasets should be realistic, publicly available, and heterogeneous, i.e., they should capture varied traffic conditions. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing effort to define such mobility scenarios by introducing a novel set of traces for vehicular network simulation. Our traces are derived from high-resolution real-world traffic counts, and describe the road traffic on two highways around Madrid, Spain, at several hours of different working days. We provide a thorough discussion of the real-world data underlying our study, and of the synthetic trace generation process. Finally, we assess the potential impact of our dataset on networking studies, by characterizing the connectivity of vehicular networks built on the different traces. Our results underscore the dramatic impact that relatively small communication range variations have on the network. Also, they unveil previously unknown temporal dynamics of the topology of highway vehicular networks, and identify their causes.