SimITS : An integrated and realistic simulation platform for vehicular networks

Vehicular communication systems are becoming one of the most emerging research areas. Many efforts have been made to provide new applications and communication protocols adapted to this new kind of networks. The performance evaluation of these proposals is a crucial step for their validation. Therefore, the need of a new open-source, realistic and integrated simulation environment for vehicular networks is a fundamental and extremely pervasive motivation behind this work. In this paper, we propose simITS, an open-source simulation platform, aiming at a realistic evaluation of protocols for large scale vehicular networks. SimITS aims to simulate properly both road traffic conditions and wireless communications characteristics and at the same time to ensure the real time exchange of simulation data between them. Additionally, a new communication protocol stack designed for vehicular communications has been implemented. Finally, we validate the platform by a basic simulation study.