Simulation Softwares for Vanets

The simulation of vanets primarily involves two components. They are traffic generators and network simulators. These are the two most important aspects that encompass vanet simulation. Though a lot of interest and research has been done on vanets, there is no single simulator software than can comprehensively deal with the simulations regarding vanets. Most academicians use NS 2.X, Qualnet, Opnet, NCTUns and so on..
But the interesting point to note is that these simulators only form a one way or offline simulations. If they are integrated with traffic simulators, they form a two way simulation mechanism. Once a two way simulation mechanism is accomplished, one can implement a customized scenario and incorporate any changes or use feedback mechanism to accomplish changes in the traffic generator.


Installation of NS 2 or NCTUns is a little complex than usual softwares. Linux kernel is used for this. The OS that I used is fedora 11. I found it difficult to install on older versions of fedora and I had a problem installing NS 2.34 on fedora 15. I installed FEDORA 11 on VMware.


This is the procedure I followed :
1) Download NS 2.34 or the version of your choice.( NS all in one package is a preferred download)
2) Download fedora 11. The iso image is available in various sites (http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/download-fedora-11-cd-dvd-iso.html#dl)  and install it on VMware.
3) Once fedora 11is installed, the user needs to download and update certain libraries n softwares that are absolutely necessary for proper functioning of NS 2.
4) Open the terminal and type the following commands either as a local user or as a root user.


if you want to install them as a root user, then type su. It will prompt for the root password. Once you enter the password, you are now  a root user. Now type the following commands :


yum install autoconf
yum install automake
yum install gcc-c++
yum install libX11-devel
yum install xorg-x11-proto-devel
yum install libXt-devel
yum install libXmu-devel


5) Now extract the NS 2 folder to your home directory. 
6) In the terminal, navigate to the NS 2 extracted folder using the CD command.Then type ./install
 for Ex, .
$ cd ns-allinone-2.34
$. /install

7) Now navigate to /etc folder. If I can recall it correctly, it's either in the home folder or in the NS 2.34 folder. Use terminal for navigation.

8) type gedit ~/.bashrc

9) Add the following lines to the document. Use your credentials in the place of X/Y. For ex, it's home/Mihir in my case.

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH
OTCL_LIB=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/otcl-1.14
NS2_LIB=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/lib
X11_LIB=/usr/X11R6/lib
USR_LOCAL_LIB=/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$OTCL_LIB:$NS2_LI B:$X11_LIB:$USR_LOCAL_LIB

# TCL_LIBRARY
TCL_LIB=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/tcl8.4.18/library
USR_LIB=/usr/lib
export TCL_LIBRARY=$TCL_LIB:$USR_LIB

# PATH
XGRAPH=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/bin:/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/tcl8.4.18/unix:/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/tk8.4.18/unix
NS=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/ns-2.34/
NAM=/X/Y/ns-allinone-2.34/nam-1.14/
PATH=$PATH:$XGRAPH:$NS:$NAM

save the document and type the following command in the terminal for the document to take effect.

source ~/.bashrc

10)If you type

$ ns

Then  "%" will appear on the screen.Now type "exit" to quit this mode and revert to "$"