Performance evaluation of vehicular DTN routing under realistic mobility models

In performance studies of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the underlying mobility model plays an important role. Since conventional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols do not work efficiently in vehicular environments due to the rapid topology changes, the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) model is often applied. In this paper, we construct a new mobility model, the Shanghai Urban Vehicular Network (SUVnet) model by using the GPS data from more than 4,000 taxis we have collected, and then investigate the performance of two kinds of DTN routing, the non geographic pure epidemic routing and our newly proposed geographic DTN routing, the Distance Aware Epidemic Routing (DAER). We use the popular random waypoint mobility model and a more complex microscopic traffic simulator generated model for performance comparison. With the two considered DTN routing protocols, conventional mobility models tend to give higher performance results than SUVnet model, the presumably more realistic mobility model.