F. J. MARTINEZ ET AL.
3.2. Existing Mobility Generators
Nowadays, several simulation software environments
exist and they are capable of generating trace files
reflecting vehicles’ movements.
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VanetMobiSim [17] is an extension of the CANU
Mobility Simulation Environment (CanuMobiSim)
[34] which focuses on vehicular mobility, and fea-
tures realistic automotive motion models at both
macroscopic and microscopic levels. At the macro-
scopic level, VanetMobiSim can import maps from
the US Census Bureau topologically integrated geo-
graphic encoding and referencing (TIGER) database,
or randomly generate them using Voronoi tessel-
lation. The TIGER/Line files constitute a digital
database of geographic features, such as roads, rail-
roads, rivers, lakes, and legal boundaries, covering
the entire United States. VanetMobiSim adds sup-
port for multi-lane roads, separate directional flows,
differentiated speed constraints and traffic signs at
intersections. At the microscopic level, it supports
mobility models such as Intelligent Driving Model
with Intersection Management (IDM/IM), Intelli-
gent Driving Model with Lane Changing (IDM/LC)
and an overtaking model (MOBIL), which interacts
with IDM/IM to manage lane changes and vehicle
accelerations and decelerations, providing realis-
tic car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure interactions.
VanetMobiSim is based on JAVA and can gener-
ate movement traces in different formats, supporting
different simulation or emulation tools for mobile
networks including ns-2 [18], GloMoSim [19], and
QualNet [9].
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SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) [11] is an
open source, highly portable, microscopic road traf-
fic simulation package designed to handle large
road networks. Its main features include colli-
sion free vehicle movement, different vehicle types,
single-vehicle routing, multi-lane streets with lane
changing, junction-based right-of-way rules, hier-
archy of junction types, an openGL graphical user
interface (GUI), and dynamic routing. SUMO can
manage large environments, i.e., 10 000 streets,
and it can import many network formats such as
Visum [35], Vissim [8], ArcView [36], or XML-
Descriptions. Thus, by combining SUMO and
openstreetmap.org [37], we can simulate traffic in
different locations of the globe. However, since
SUMO is a pure traffic generator, its generated traces
cannot be directly used by the available network sim-
ulators, which is a serious shortcoming.
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MOVE (MObility model generator for VEhicular
networks) [12] rapidly generates realistic mobility
models for VANET simulations. MOVE is built on
top of SUMO. The output of MOVE is a mobil-
ity trace file that contains information of realistic
vehicle movements which can be immediately used
by popular network simulation tools such as ns-2
or GloMoSim. In addition, MOVE provides a GUI
that allows the user to quickly generate realistic
simulation scenarios without the hassle of writing
simulation scripts as well as learning about the inter-
nal details of the simulator.
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STRAW (STreet RAndom Waypoint) [14] provides
accurate simulation results by using a vehicular
mobility model on real US cities, based on the
operation of real vehicular traffic. STRAW’s cur-
rent implementation is written for the JiST/SWANS
discrete-event simulator, and its mobility traces can-
not be directly used by other network simulators,
such as ns-2. STRAW is part of the C3 (Car-to-Car
Cooperation) project [38]. A more realistic mobil-
ity model with the appropriate level of detail for
vehicular networks is critical for accurate network
simulation. The STRAW mobility model constrains
node movement to streets defined by map data for
real US cities and limits their mobility according to
vehicular congestion and simplified traffic control
mechanisms.
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FreeSim [15] is a fully customizable macroscopic
and microscopic free-flow traffic simulator that
allows for multiple freeway systems to be easily rep-
resented and loaded into the simulator as a graph
data structure with edge weights determined by the
current speeds. Traffic and graph algorithms can
be created and executed for the entire network or
for individual vehicles or nodes, and the traffic
data used by the simulator can be user generated
or be converted from real-time data gathered by a
transportation organization. Vehicles in FreeSim can
communicate with the system monitoring the traf-
fic on the freeways, which makes FreeSim ideal for
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) simulation.
FreeSim is licensed under the GNU General Public
License, and the source code is available freely for
download.
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CityMob v.2 [13] CityMob is a ns-2 compati-
ble mobility model generator proposed for use
in VANETs. Citymob implements three different
mobility models: (a) Simple Model (SM), (b) Man-
hattan Model (MM), and (c) realistic Downtown
Model (DM). In DM model, streets are arranged in
a Manhattan style grid, with a uniform block size
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/wcm