Identifying the key factors affecting warning message dissemination in VANET real urban scenarios

In recent years, new architectures and technologies have been proposed for Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs). Due to the cost and complexity of deploying such networks, most of these proposals rely on simulation. However, we find that most of the experiments made to validate these proposals tend to overlook the most important and representative factors. Moreover, the scenarios simulated tend to be very simplistic (highways or Manhattan-based layouts), which could seriously affect the validity of the obtained results. In this paper, we present a statistical analysis based on the 2k factorial methodology to determine the most representative factors affecting traffic safety applications under real roadmaps. Our purpose is to determine which are the key factors affecting Warning Message Dissemination in order to concentrate research tests on such parameters, thus avoiding unnecessary simulations and reducing the amount of simulation time required. Simulation results show that the key factors affecting warning messages delivery are the density of vehicles and the roadmap used. Based on this statistical analysis, we consider that VANET researchers must evaluate the benefits of their proposals using different vehicle densities and city scenarios, to obtain a broad perspective on the effectiveness of their solution. Finally, since city maps can be quite heterogeneous, we propose a roadmap profile classification to further reduce the number of cities evaluated.