Protocol modeling accuracy in VANET simulators

Vehicular ad hoc networks are about to enter the mass market in upcoming years. High effort for real world field tests leads to high dependency of development and evaluation of such networks on simulations. We compare supported features of common simulation frameworks with current standards and study the performance impact of incomplete standard conformance. We find that a lack of support for data encoding schemes and security functionality may massively affect simulation results. Our findings apply to many well-known simulation frameworks. Proposals to overcome identified weaknesses are provided.