Evaluation of Information Dissemination Characteristics in a PTS VANET

Abstract

This work examines the feasibility of using a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to improve the bus location monitoring and control of the public transportation system (PTS) in Santiago, Chile. A realistic simulation, based on geo data of Santiago and bus route information obtained from the Transantiago PTS, provides results about the impact of different transmission ranges of vehicles and roadside units (RSU) and the necessity of RSUs to support the infrastructure and performance of VANETs. Different traffic situations are studied by varying the amount of vehicles used in the simulation. Simulation results state that available MANET routing protocols provide similar suboptimal results for the presented VANET scenario. This presents a strong requirement for VANET routing protocols to be used in high mobility environments. The more RSUs are deployed, the higher is the delivery ratio and the lower the mean end-to-end delay and path length. In contrast to the deployment of RSUs, the highest transmission range did not lead to the best results. Simulations conducted with transmission ranges of 800m and 1000m achieved worse results than a transmission range of 500m.