Simulation platform for inter-vehicle communications and analysis of periodic information exchange

Due to the large amount of nodes that could comprise a vehicular network, simulation is a valuable tool used for the design and analysis of inter-vehicle communication protocols. In this paper we first describe all the components of a simulation framework that has ns-2 as core building block. Our main contributions are an accurate implementation of the MAC and PHY modules adjusted to vehicular environments together with a well defined set of metrics to evaluate communication protocols for vehicular networks. Second, we make use of the simulation framework to perform a detailed analysis of periodic exchange of broadcast messages when adjusting transmission power and packet generation rate for different propagation models