Online and offline communication architecture for vehicular ad-hoc networks using NS3 and SUMO simulators

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is one of the future technologies that envisions the real-time vehicular communication. This technology uses the support of IEEE wireless communication protocols to successfully exchange messages between vehicles. The implementation and testing of VANET scenarios in real-time is challenging since it requires an expensive infrastructure. Hence, the simulation of VANET scenarios play an important role in evaluating the performance of these large-scale networks. However, the proper simulation of VANET scenarios should satisfy two main requirements: realistic mobility of vehicles on the roads and wireless network communication. A comparison of the various simulation tools that can be used for VANET scenarios has been undertaken in this work. The work also proposes an architecture for online and offline communication between Network Simulator 3 (NS3) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) with public cloud support. The performance of the proposed architecture has been evaluated using various VANET simulation scenarios with varied number of vehicles along with real-time road traffic scenarios. The discussed and illustrated results show that the proposed architecture can be used for simulating various realistic VANET scenarios efficiently with a large number of vehicles in real-time.