The Bologna ringway dataset: Improving road network conversion in SUMO and validating urban mobility via navigation services

The current lack of reference datasets of road traffic mobility for network simulation jeopardizes the reliability and reproducibility of vehicular networking research. We contribute to the ongoing effort to develop dependable and publicly available mobility traces through the following: 1) implementing an original version of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) road network conversion tool that allows importing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in a neat automated fashion; 2) generating an original dataset of road traffic in Bologna, Italy; and 3) providing a novel validation methodology that builds on open data provided by navigation service, which we leverage to assess the quality of the proposed Bologna dataset. These three contributions are expected to benefit the whole research community, since they not only provide a new ready-to-use realistic dataset that can be input to network simulators but ease the generation and validation of further vehicular mobility traces for networking research as well.