Performance Assessment of an Epidemic Protocol in VANET Using Real Traces

Many vehicular ad-hoc network protocols have been validated using complex urban mobility simulators or by means of the few publicly available real mobility traces. This work presents an extensive measurement campaign of the positions of a fleet of 370 taxi cabs moving around the city of Rome, Italy. Due to its street network and its traffic conditions, Rome presents a characteristic mobility pattern representative of an ancient city with heavy road congestion, and therefor provides a valuable test case to experiment VANET protocols. We exploit these traces to run a set of experiments to assess the performance of a simple epidemic protocol that we compare with the basic random waypoint model in order to quantify how far the performance metrics are from this baseline. The results show the possible outcomes of implementing data dissemination through an opportunistic network that uses taxi cabs as an information vector.