A Framework to Analyze the Impact of Maps on VANET Simulation

Mobility models play an important role on VANET simulation, which has been discussed in many studies. However, few studies have analyzed the impact of maps. We find that maps can greatly influence simulation results. We present a framework to help researchers analyze the impact of maps. We regard intersections in the map as virtual nodes and propose Virtual node coverage (VNC) and Virtual connected components (VCC) as two metrics to estimate the impact of maps. Through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we show that our approach can be applied to various scenarios and researchers can use our approach to analyze the impact of maps on VANET simulation.