Towards a comparable evaluation for VANET protocols: NS-2 experiments builder assistant and extensible test bed

Proceedings of: 9th Embedded Security in Cars Conference (ESCAR 2011), November 9 to 10, 2011, Dresden, GermanyIn order to validate an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) application or service, simulation techniques are usually employed. Nowadays, there are two problems associated to this kind of validation: the relative complexity of existing simulators and the lack of common criteria in the creation of simulation experiments. The first one makes it hard for users not familiar with a simulation tool to create and execute comprehensive experiments. The second one leads to a situation in which different proposals are validated in different scenarios, thus making it difficult to compare their performance. This work contributes on addressing both problems by proposing VanSimFM, an open-source assistant tool for creating NS-2 simulation experiments, and by defining an extensible test bed which contains a set of simulation scenarios. The test bed is intended to represent the different situations that may be found in a real vehicular environment.This work is partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion of Spain, project E-SAVE, under grant TIN2009-13461.No publicad

Diseño e implementación de VanSimFM, un asistente para la generación de escenarios vehiculares en NS-2

Las redes vehiculares ad-hoc (VANET) serán, con toda probabilidad, el gran salto de las TIC en la industria automovilística tan pronto como se disponga de modelos de comportamiento que justifiquen las inversiones necesarias para desarrollar los dispositivos hardware y las aplicaciones que den contenido a esas redes. En la práctica, estos modelos de comportamiento sólo pueden obtenerse, a un coste asumible, a través de aplicaciones de simulación capaces de predecir el comportamiento de una aplicación o protocolo para VANET en diferentes escenarios. Aunque se dispone de un gran número de simuladores, tanto de movilidad como de red, existen dificultades importantes para su uso de forma confortable: - Su manejo no es sencillo, y varía bastante de una herramienta a otra. - La interacción entre simuladores de movilidad y red también resulta compleja. - Al trabajar cada investigador sobre parámetros diferentes de los demás, a veces resulta difícil o imposible comparar resultados de simulaciones del mismo modelo realizadas con criterios distintos. Ante esta situación, este proyecto plantea el análisis, diseño y construcción de un sistema que: - Integre diferentes simuladores disponibles. - Automatice la interacción entre simuladores de movilidad y de red. - Simplifique y haga homogénea la creación de experimentos de simulación. - Permita la incorporación de nuevas funcionalidades y herramientas. Adicionalmente, el proyecto pretende construir un catálogo de experimentos de simulación con los escenarios más representativos del entorno real de las VANET. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Ad-hoc vehicular networks (VANET) will become, with a high probability, the big bet of the Information and Communication Technologies into the automotive industry, as soon as models of behavior are made available to justify the costs of developing new hardware devices and applications that build those nets and their contents. In practice, those behavioral models can only be obtained, at a reasonable cost, by using simulation applications capable of predicting the behavior of a VANET on different scenarios. Even though such tools already exist, for mobility and network simulations, there are some important difficulties for them to be used in a comfortable way: - Use is not simple, and quite different from tool to tool. - The interaction among mobility and network simulation tools is also fairly complex. - As each person works on parameters different from the others, sometimes is difficult or even impossible to compare simulation results of a single model elaborated by two different set of criteria. To face such situation, this project proposes the analysis, design and construction of a system that: - Integrates different simulation tools available. - Automates the interactions among mobility and network simulation tools. - Simplify and homogenize the definition of simulation experiments. - Allows the inclusion of new functionalities/tools. Additionally, the project will attempt to create a catalog of simulation experiments that includes the most representative scenarios of the VANET’s real environment.Ingeniería en Informátic