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3rd IEEE Inteernational Conference on Adaptive Science and Technnology (ICAST 2011)

Performance Evaluuation of Constant Bit Rate and Variable

Bit Rate Traffic Models
M
on Vehicular Ad Hooc Network
Using Dynnamic Source Routing Protoocol
Panos Bakalis*, Lawal Bello, OlamideJagun,
O
KwashieAnang, Titus Eneh & Aminu Muhammad
Deptt of Wireless & Mobile Communication Engr,
University of Greenwich, UK
E-mail :{P..bakalis, L.Bello, et14, K.Anang}@greenwich.ac.uk
AbstractIn this paper, we describ
be a simulation
performance of Vehicular Ad hoc netw
work on different
traffic models in a dynamic changing environment.
e
The
simulation results showed that as delay an
nd jitter increases,
the throughput of receiving bits decrreases, the nodes
stabilizes and the delay tends to drop at in
nterval but packets
do drop as the packet size increases.
Keywords Intelligent Transportation System,
S
Vehicular
Ad hoc Networks, Contention Based Routing,
R
Dynamic
Source Routing.

accidents by cautioning drivers about the risk before they

actually face it. Such networks innvolve sensors and On Board
Units (OBU) installed in vehicles as well as RSU. These data
b fed into vehicle navigation
collected from the sensors could be
system to provide alternative drivving routes and thus helps to
avoid platoon vehicles, improve rooad capacity and with active
safety systems in place, mainly reduce the number of car
accidents.
A pictorial example of a vehicularr ad hoc network scenario is
shown in figure 1.

I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless vehicular ad hoc network researchh plays a vital role
within the field of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The
recent developments in wireless technologies have made
a
Roadside Unit
Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication (V2V) and
(RSU) achievable in mobile ad hoc networkks (MANETs). This
has given birth and brought a new concept of MANET network
NET). Vehicular Ad
known as the vehicular ad hoc network (VAN
hoc Networks (VANETs) are self-organizinng communities of
wheeled mobile units consisting of large num
mber of vehicles and
a small number of fixed infrastructure nodees such as roadside
access units within radio communication raange to each other.
The initiative behind VANET is facilitating road safety, traffic
management and infotainment disseminatioon for drivers and
passengers. Internetworking over VANETs has been of great
interest and importance for researchers by car manufacturers,
mic sector and it is
governmental organizations and the academ
gaining a great deal of momentum for the past few years now.
n
in that they
VANET networks are identical to MANET network
rapidly and dynamically change network toppologies due to the
fast motion of vehicles but differ because off the regular change
o vehicular nodes,
in vehicular density, relative high speed of
congestion on roads, traffic control mechanism and the mobility
of vehicles are constrained by predefined roadds. The idea behind
VANET is to improve the safety of motor veehicles where many
lives have been lost and much more injuries have been incurred
due to car crashes. Accident prevention caautions can quickly
alert drivers about conditions that could causee a collision. And in
the event on an accident, communication willl be transmitted to
other vehicles preventing further accidentts from occurring.
Rescue vehicles could immediately receive exact
e
coordinates of
the location of an accident to reach the scenee of the emergency
faster. The use of VANETs could enhance the
t convenience of
drivers with its safety system features whichh may intelligently
broadcast road information. Information succh as road hazards,
incidents and real-time traffic congestion, higgh-speed tolling and
so on. VANET should, upon implementation, collect and
distributes a fety information to massively redduce the number of

Figure 1. Vehicular ad hoc network scenario (Car to Car

Communication Consortium 2010 [1].
New applications are proposed by [2,3,4]
[
for vehicular networks
that include Electronic Toll Colllection (ETC), car to home
communications, travel and tourism
m information distribution and
multimedia and game applications.. However, these applications
need reliable and unfailing commuunication equipment which is
capable of achieving high data rates
r
and stable connectivity
between the transmitter and recceiver under high mobility
conditions and different surroundinggs.
In [5], an analysis of network trafficc in ad hoc networks based on
the Destination Sequenced Distannce Vector (DSDV) protocol
with an emphasis on mobility and communication
c
patterns of the
mobile nodes is presented. The goal of the authors simulations
was to measure the ability of DSDV routing protocol to react to
multi-hop ad-hoc network topologgy changes in terms of scene
size, mobile nodes movement, nuumber of connections among
mobile nodes, and also the amounnt of data each mobile node
transmits. To measure this, the basic methodology was defined to

9
978-1-4673-0759-8/11/$26.002011
IEEE

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3rd IEEE International Conference on Adaptive Science and Technology (ICAST 2011)

a set of movement scenarios and communication patterns and

applied them to an ad hoc network. Different simulations were
examined by changing the parameters for mobile nodes
movement scenarios and their connection patterns. The number
of forwarded packets increased as the size of the ad hoc network
scene area increased. Fewer packets needed to be forwarded
when there was larger number of mobile nodes in a scene.
Conversely, ratio of lost packets decreased with an increase in
numbers of mobile nodes. Increasing the number of connections
among fixed number of nodes enhanced the routing overhead
and the packet delivery rate. Increasing the transmission rate in
an ad hoc network with fixed size and number of mobile node
increased the number of transmitted packets in different groups.
Interestingly, this increase did not affect the packet delivery rate
or the routing overhead. It was observed in [6] that despite the
popularity of the most common routing protocols such as Ad
Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Destination
Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Dynamic Source Routing
(DSR) and Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR),
research efforts had not focused much in evaluating their
performance when applied to variable bit rate (VBR). But these
were implemented in a mobile ad hoc network scenario [7]. Ns-2
network simulator was used to evaluate the performance
comparison of these protocols for VBR in MANETs. Proactive
protocols failed to respond fast enough to changing topology.
The authors observed that routing overhead in proactive
protocols remained almost constant and OLSR being winner
irrespective of mobility while AODV increased with increase in
mobility. AODV and DSR use reactive approach to route
discovery, but with different operation mechanism. DSR used
source routing and route cache and did not depend on their timer
base activity. On other hand AODV used routing tables, one
route per destination, sequence number to maintain route. DSR
however generated lower overhead than AODV while OLSR and
DSDV generated almost constant overhead due proactive nature.
The studies showed that reactive protocols perform better than
proactive protocols. The author finally concluded that DSR
performed well in terms of packet delivery ratio and less routing
overload while AODV performed better in terms of less average
end to end delay. The need to improve AODV routing protocol
performance throughput was addressed in [8]. The AODV
protocol always exchange control packets between neighbour
nodes for routing which increases the bandwidth consumption.
To make it more usable for VANET, elimination of route
discovery phase by restricting neighbours distance and number
of discovered routes was proposed. There were two methods
used: restricting route request packets and restricting routes
based on distance. In the restricting route request packets,
number of routes was reduced by limiting number of discovered
routes based on a route boundary. While in restricting routes
based on distance was based on distance in reducing the number
of hops, finding the shortest route between any source and
destination and therefore broken links along a route would be
reduced. This new improved AODV was termed Prior AODV
(PAODV). Performance evaluation of routing protocols of
AODV, DSR and Swarm routing protocols was conducted by
[9], this is to verify a suitable protocol for VANET. Each
simulation scenario was repeated 10 times to achieve a high
confident level in results. Four typical performance measures for
VANETs were considered and finally concluded that AODV and
DSR might not be suitable for vehicular environments but
SWARM showed promising results.
Routing protocols have always been a challenge in vehicular ad
hoc networks since the position of vehicular nodes change in
high speed and time. Proposed routing protocols intended for
VANET could play a big role and change the face of vehicular

environments. A routing protocol that would enhance the

stability of Inter-vehicular Communications (IVC) and RoadVehicle Communications (RVC) in VANET networks is
proposed in [10]. This was divided into three parts: Grouping of
vehicles, Receive on Most Stable Group-Path (ROMSGP) packet
format and the calculation of link expiration time (LET). The
idea behind the scheme was to group vehicles according to their
velocity headings that would ensure that vehicles belong to the
same group and would generally move together. Routes
involving vehicles from the same group thus exhibit high level of
stability and among these possible routes, communication was
set up on the most stable route using the (ROMSGP) scheme.
Decision on the most stable link was made based on the
computation of the (LET) of each part and the path with the
longest LET was considered the most stable link. Simulation
results showed the effectiveness of the protocol compared to
DSR and Associativity-Based Routing (ABR) and concluded
that the proposed protocol should be able to provide good
stability and maintain high throughput in VANET environment.
A contention based routing protocol (CBRP) for VANETs in
urban environments is proposed in [11]. CBRPs main idea was
to forward the packet through the wireless channel as much as
possible, and adopt the idea of carry and forward if there is no
suitable neighbour for packet forwarding. The protocol worked
in two modes: street mode and junction mode. When a packet is
carried by a vehicle in a street, CBRP operates in street mode;
using contention based forwarding to deliver the packet greedily
to the next junction. And when a packet is in the junction area,
CBRP operates in junction mode; it first performs junction
selection in order to determine the next junction, and then uses
the contention based forwarding to forward the packet to the new
next junction. CBRP performed better than the position based
type in terms of packet delivery ratio as well as average delay
transmission cost.
One of the major worries of vehicular ad hoc networks is about
its traffic and mobility models. Traffic and mobility models
designed for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) needs to be
experimented on VANET to evaluate its performance in
vehicular scenarios. However, conducting real experiments on
roads for this kind of network are both dangerous and expensive.
A real experiment might require the need of renting many
vehicles (cars, Lorries, trucks, vans and so on), purchase
communication gadgets and employ experimenters. At times,
vehicles need to move on a high speed scenario which poses a
possible danger such as collisions with other vehicles and even
pedestrians. For this reason simulation model is used to carry out
the research using Ns-2 simulator.
Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to evaluate and
compare the performance of Constant Bit Rate (CBR) over
Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic models on vehicular ad hoc
network using on demand Dynamic Source Routing protocol.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II; focus on
the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol for ad hoc wireless
network. In Section III we describe the simulations model,
results and interpretations. Section IV, presents the conclusions

II.

DYNAMIC SOURCE
PROTOCOL (DSR)

ROUTING

DSR is a simple and efficient routing protocol designed

specifically for use in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks of
mobile nodes which operate entirely on demand, allowing the

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189

routing packet overhead of DSR to scale automatically to only

what is needed to react to changes in the routes currently in use
[12]. Performance evaluation conducted on both proactive and
reactive protocols [13-16], showed that DSR performed better
than AODV and other proactive protocols in terms of
throughput, end-to-end delay, and packets drop. The DSR
performance is attributed to its characteristics of having multiple
routes to other destination. In case of link failure, it does not
require a new route discovery processes. Because of this, end-toend delay is reduced, t less packet drops and less energy
consumption. Hence, the DSR protocol was chosen as genial
candidate for carrying out this work.

III.

SIMULATION MODEL

We use Ns-2 simulator (version 2.29.2) developed in [17].

Details about the simulation model and environment are
presented in the rest of this section.
A.

SIMULATION PARAMETERS

In order to evaluate the performance of Vehicular ad hoc

network on two different traffic models (CBR and VBR),
simulations were carried out using Ns-2 simulator [17]. The
topology consists of 1000 m X 1000 m grid with 50 mobile
nodes moving around using the random way point mobility
model. Constant bit rate (CBR) as well as Variable bit rate agents
was used for generating traffic in the network. Each simulation
scenario was repeated 6 times to achieve a high confidence level
in results over a period of 500 seconds real time, which enabled
the simulation to converge for accurate result. The basic
parameters used for the simulations are summarized in Table I.
Table I. Simulation Parameters
Simulation parameters
Parameters
Values
Network Simulator
NS2-2.29.2
Simulation Area
1000 x 1000 metres
Simulation Time
500 seconds
Number of vehicles
50
Number of trials
6
Speed
70 miles per hour
Traffic Model
CBR,VBR
Mac Protocol
IEEE 802.11
Propagation Model
Two-ray Ground reflection model
Packet Size
532 bytes
Channel Type
Wireless Channel
Antenna Model
Omni directional
B.

SIMULATION RESULTS

In this section, we present simulation results for the performance

evaluation. Figure 2 and 3shows the average end to end time
delay versus throughput of receiving bits. This illustrates what
happens to the delay as the throughput of receiving bits is being
received. At the beginning of the route discovery, the network
with VBR traffic model experienced an average delay of 0.11
seconds as compared to5.0 X 10 average delay of the network
with CBR traffic model. When the route is discovered, the
throughput broadcasted increases to 2.5 x 105 bits for VBR and
1.0 x 104 bits for CBR traffic model and the delay fell drastically
to 0.01 and 0.001 seconds respectively. When VBR generated
data traffic of 5.0 x 105 bits was received, there was a broken
link and an alternative route needs to be taken. Instead of starting
all the process afresh, the route had to re-initiate another route
discovery process in which a delay was triggered to about 0.1

second. This shows that as throughput of receiving bits of CBR

generated traffic increases, the nodes stabilises and the delay
tends to drop at interval.
Packet jitter is usually expressed as an absolute value of delay
variation. The delay is specified from the start of the packet
being transmitted at the source to the end of the packet being
received at the destination. The sequence numbers here refer to
the packets. Different sequence number is generated for every
new packet created as shown in figure 4& 5. In the early stages
of the route request process of the network with VBR traffic
model, sequence numbers from 1150 to 1375 experiences very
less amount of packet to be received by the destination as
compared to CBR traffic model which remain the same for the
whole different packet sequence number. As the sequence
number increases and more packets sent. The rapid change of
jitter is attributed to the frequent change of network topology and
the mechanism of inherent routing update.
Figure 6 & 7 shows that, as the packet size increases, the
throughput decreases. This means that there are some packets
dropped during transmission. Packets dropped are as a result of
the DSR route maintenance mechanism. Despite the fact that
DSR does not locally repair a broken link CBR traffic model
achieves a higher average performance throughput as compared
to VBR traffic model.

Figure 2. (VBR) Average End to End Delay vs.

throughput of receiving bits.

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3rd IEEE International Conference on Adaptive Science and Technology (ICAST 2011)

Figure 3. (CBR) Average End to End Delay vs.

throughput of receiving bits.

Figure4. (VBR) Jitter of Received Packet vs. Sequence Number.

Figure5. (CBR) Jitter of Received Packet vs. Sequence Number.

Figure 6. (VBR)Throughput of receiving bits vs.

Packet Size.

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Figure 7. (CBR)Throughput of receiving bits vs. Packet Size.

IV.

CONCLUSION

Due to the importance of traffic and mobility models in

Vehicular Ad hoc wireless network. We evaluated the
performance of Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and Variable Bit Rate
(VBR) traffic models on vehicular ad hoc network. The
simulation result showed that as throughput of receiving bits
increased, the nodes stabilised and the average end to end delay
tends to drop at interval. As more packets are broadcasted and
then discovered, the network was stabilised and network
topology was steady. The rapid change of jitter is attributed to
the frequent movement of wheeled mobile units and the
mechanism of inherent routing update. Packets are dropped as
the packet size increased which is not suitable for a high vehicle
mobility environment.

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