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

Abstract

In 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.