Running consistent, parallel experiments in vehicular environment

The comparison of different applications and protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a very difficult task. This is mainly due to the nature of VANET, for which it is virtually impossible to replicate the same exact environment in two separate experiments. This paper introduces a flexible experiment structure that will allow different protocols to be compared in the same mobility pattern and channel conditions in VANET. A virtualized environment is setup on each node where the combination of Xen and Gentoo software is used to create multiple virtual guests. All virtual guests on the same machine use different protocols and share the wireless interface. We compare the widely recognized ad-hoc routing protocols AODV and OLSR to demonstrate the novelty of our system. Experiment results show that even with arbitrary external interference and mobility pattern, meaningful comparisons between different protocols can be carried out. © 2010 IEEE.