Comparison and evaluation of routing protocols based on a collaborative simulation using SUMO and NS3 with TraCI

Vehicle Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging technology and a new application of mobile Ad Hoc technology in the field of traffic. As the simulation experiments cost less manpower and material resources and they are easy to reproduce the same scenario, VANET simulation technology has become a focus of scholars. But node mobility is strictly limited in the realistic traffic environment and fast moving speed leads to more frequent changes in network topology. So in VANET simulation, it is not appropriate to use traffic simulation tools or network simulation tools alone. In this paper, we integrated SUMO, middleware tool TraCI with NS3 to compare and evaluate the performance of four different topology based routing protocols. They are AODV, DSR, TORA and DSDV. We changed the node mobility and density to observe the experiment results. The main performance metrics for protocols are Packet Drop Ratio, Average Delay and Normalized Routing Load. We concluded that there are many differences and advantages under the proactive and reactive routing protocols from the values of metrics.