High-fidelity evaluation framework and application-centric performance analysis of vehicular networks

With the continuous increase and diversification of applications and services enabled through information collection and communication, consequently, vehicular networks are required to optimize performance simultaneously in the many domains that these networks are expected to support. In order to improve the end user's satisfaction of various classes of applications, we propose an evaluation paradigm that incorporates application-level metrics into the analysis of network systems to facilitate the gathering of an understanding of vehicular network systems from the perspective of the application, as opposed to the traditional paradigm of evaluations centered at network-level performance. This evaluation paradigm serves as a foundation for developing simulation environments and performing analysis on vehicular networks. Under the application-evaluation paradigm, we develop a distributed simulation platform that integrates transportation simulation, wireless network simulation and real applications into a common framework. The integrated simulation platform provides high-fidelity communication network models and realistic transportation models, allows user level traffic simulation and wireless network simulation and is capable of performing accurate, scalable, flexible and efficient evaluation of vehicular networks. Using the evaluation framework developed, performance analysis on existing vehicular network architectures and protocols are performed to better understand the implications of operations and optimizations at various layers of the protocol stack on the user-perceived performance for a variety of applications. Four case studies are designed and conducted, which, in light of application-level and transportation system level metrics, respectively examine the effectiveness of vehicular networks in supporting file transfer, web browsing, video streaming, Internet access and Intelligent. Transportation Systems.