%0 Journal Article
%T Integrated Extensible Simulation Platform for Vehicular Sensor Networks in Smart Cities
%A Xiaolan Tang
%A Juhua Pu
%A Ke Cao
%A Yi Zhang
%A Zhang Xiong
%J International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/860415
%X This paper presents an integrated extensible simulation platform BHU-VSim for vehicular sensor networks (VSNs), which aims to support general simulation environment for typical vehicular applications in smart cities. To deploy urban traffic scenario, we propose a hierarchical object structure to manage entities with different movement models in the network. Furthermore, we design a general data container to present different kinds of data transferred and provide two schemes to generate data packages. Regarding transmission control, the platform includes three components: task scheduling, storage management, and routing deployment. We support importing external routing protocols and configuring relevant parameters to satisfy various transmission requirements. Finally, an instance application, real-time traffic monitoring, and an example of statistical analysis are introduced to prove the practicality and accuracy of the simulator. In one word, as an initiate attempt, our platform provides significant improvement of VSNs¡¯ simulations. 1. Introduction A vehicular sensor network (VSN) is a kind of network with sensors equipped on fast moving vehicles and provides ubiquitous connectivity among mobile users and efficient vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. It is widely used in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to support various applications, such as safe driving, real-time traffic monitoring, highway toll payment, multimedia resource sharing, and urban mobile surveillance [1]. As vehicles broaden and deepen the extent of data transmission, VSN has been considered as an important improvement in information collection by humans and has attracted increasing research in both academia and industry [2, 3]. Compared with traditional wireless sensor networks, VSN has its own characteristics, such as loose energy constraint, dynamic network topology, unstable connectivity, and geography-based communication patterns. Nowadays, a brand new theory, interconnecting things together to form a ubiquitous internet of things (IoTs) [4], has been put forward. IoT initiates many new research domains, including smart city. One typical application in smart cities is smart traffic, which aims to avoid traffic jams, save energy resources, and reduce vehicles¡¯ emissions. Although there already exist ITSs in many metropolises to support real-time traffic monitoring, they require many infrastructures, like base stations, lengthy cables, reliable data center, and others. Considering the large overhead to establish such an ITS and its harsh demand about the environment, the
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdsn/2012/860415/