A Framework for Performance Evaluation of VANETs Using NS-3 Simulator

Abstract

During the last decade, the number of vehicles on roads has been rapidly growing. Therefore, the demands for communication on the move are also increasing and the attention from many researchers is focused on the Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) because of their importance for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). Due to the complexity and cost of practical evaluation of VANETs, the researchers often rely on network simulation in order to evaluate their work. In this paper, we have developed a Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) based framework for VANETs that provides network performance analysis based on the key performance indicators such as throughput, packet loss ratio, overhead, end-to-end delay, jitter, etc. Since VANETs are highly dynamic networks, many researchers have proposed different routing protocols in order to improve the network performance. In this paper we have compared several topology-based routing protocols, and proposed utilization of the commonly used Expected Transmission Count (ETX) metric to improve VANET performance.</p