Civil and Architectural Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department-College of Engineering-Sultan Qaboos University
Experimental Evaluation Of Broadcast Communication In Vanets
Shaima Mohammed Shakeel Ahmed
Abstract
Rapid developments in the field of transportation have transformed our ways of commuting
from one place to another. This development has also been a major cause of road accidents and
fatalities for the human beings worldwide. In an attempt to make the roads safer with lesser
number of accidents and fatalities, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is proposed by the
research community. In such networks, vehicles are modeled as nodes that have the capability
to communicate with one another. Such communications may prevent accidents, thus making
roads safer to everyone.
There are two common methods for studying VANETs, namely: Simulations and Field testing
(prototyping). Various research projects have given solutions for fulfilling the technological
requirements in VANETs, using simulations, but currently the focus is shifting from simulationbased modeling, into more practical implementation and experimental field tests. The primary
objective of this thesis is to evaluate performance of a single-hop periodic broadcast
communication, known as beacons or HELLO packets, in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio
(PDR) and message delivery delay through experimental field tests. The secondary objective is
to compare some of the results obtained through field tests with simulations. The experimental
process acquires information from each node in the network (e.g. nodes' speed, location, and
node ID). This information is then disseminated periodically to all the surrounding nodes in the
network. A total of four nodes have been deployed for the field tests due to complexity of the
tasks on the express way.
The effect of varying parameters such as speed, mobility, node density and road environments
on the PDR and Packet End-to-end Delay are studied. The results of the experiments reveal that
a constant relative velocity for all nodes in the network did not have a significant impact on the
PDR for the considered VANET topology, whereas node density and road surroundings created
a noticeable impact on the PDR. In addition, Packet End-to-end Delay increases with node
density and packet size, while it remains unaffected by inter node distance of up to 450 meters.
These results will contribute improving the current simulation models for a better performance
analysis of VANETs.