Performance Evaluation of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols for Vanets: Using Bi-directionally Coupled Simulator

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a new communication paradigm that enables the communication between vehicles moving at high speeds on the roads. This has opened door to develop several new applications like, traffic engineering, traffic management, dissemination of emergency information to avoid hazardous situations and other user applications. In this thesis, the performance analysis of proactive and reactive routing protocols in both urban and highway scenarios is presented. The simulations performed for this analysis are of two types; bi-directionally coupled simulations and offline simulations. In both types, urban and highway scenarios are simulated. In bi-directionally coupled simulations, network and traffic simulators are integrated at runtime to exchange different commands. This thesis is the first research effort that integrates both network and traffic simulators at runtime. This integration helps in modeling emergency scenarios on roads like accidents, etc. In offline simulations, real world maps are used to model urban and highway topologies.