A flexible simulator for cooperative communication systems in vehicular environment

Abstract

As an emerging technology, the cooperative communication systems in the vehicular environment should be quite expected to make driving more safe and convenient. But in the real traffic situation, it is very hard to evaluate and measure the effects of new technologies. This paper presents a novel integrated simulator for design and verification of communication protocols and safety applications in reliable vehicular environments. The simulator supports the stacks of IEEE802.11p and some parts of WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment) protocol stacks which are generally accepted for vehicular communication systems. In addition, by supporting different propagation models the proposed simulator can deal with the several communication environments such as highway, rural areas and cities. The communication protocols which are proposed in vehicular safety applications basically support multi-hop as well as single hop communications. Especially, the simulator provides various functions of performance evaluations, so that engineers can measure the effects of new technologies in the vehicular environment not to make a real environment.