High-fidelity application-centric evaluation framework for vehicular networks

This paper proposes an evaluation framework for vehicular networks to achieve accurate, scalable, flexible and repeatable performance studies through the utilization of a hybrid emulation testbed and incorporation of high fidelity protocol and environment models. The proposed framework not only addresses the unique challenges of vehicular networks but also enables new types of network analyses via the capability of conducting application-centric evaluation. Compared to traditional network-centric evaluation, case studies show scenarios where network-level statistics do not clearly discriminate between the two routing protocols while significant performance differences were observed using the application-level metrics. The paper also identifies future research directions that are enabled by the evaluation framework.