Improving the accuracy of environment-specific vehicular channel modeling.

Networking research benefits from the controlled, repeatable experimentation provided by simulation and emulation systems. Making such simulations realistic is a challenge for wireless systems and is especially difficult for vehicular networks. This paper introduces a realistic vehicular channel simulation model that includes a Line-Of-Sight (LOS) module and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) fading module specially designed for vehicular channels. Specialized models can provide a close approximation of real channel conditions, but their accuracy is limited by the quality of input information about the environment being modeled. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to estimate location-specific scattering properties using aerial photography. We show that this approach significantly improves the accuracy of simulated channel fading.