The data is available under the
Creative Commons licence.
You must tell where the data is from, it is not allowed to use it
for commercial purposes, as soon as you use it we want to be informed about it.
Motivation
Simulation is the tool of choice for the large-scale performance evaluation of upcoming telecommunication networking paradigms that involve users aboard vehicles, such as next-generation cellular networks for vehicular access, pure vehicular ad hoc networks, and opportunistic disruption-tolerant networks.
The single most distinguishing feature of vehicular network simulation lies in the mobility of users, resulting from complex macroscopic and microscopic dynamics.
Today’s challenge lies in generating traffic traces that (i) compass very large urban areas, i.e., whole cities including their surroundings, and (ii) are realistic also from a macroscopic point of view, i.e., that faithfully mimic large traffic flows across a metropolitan area.
Trace
The vehicular mobility dataset is mainly based on the data made available by the TAPASCologne project. TAPASCologne is an initiative by the Institute of Transportation Systems at the German Aerospace Center (ITS-DLR), aimed at reproducing, with the highest level of realism possible, car traffic in the greater urban area of the city of Cologne, in Germany.
To that end, different state-of-art data sources and simulation tools are brought together, so to cover all of the specific aspects required for a proper characterization of vehicular traffic:
- The street layout of the Cologne urban area is obtained from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database;
- The microscopic mobility of vehicles is simulated with the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) software;
- The traffic demand information on the macroscopic traffic flows across the Cologne urban area (i.e., the O/D matrix) is derived through the Travel and Activity PAtterns Simulation (TAPAS) methodology;
- The traffic assignment of the vehicular flows described by the TAPASCologne O/D matrix over the road topology is performed by means of Gawron’s dynamic user assignment algorithm.
The resulting synthetic trace of the car traffic in a the city of Cologne covers a region of 400 square kilometers for a period of 24 hours, comprising more than 700.000 individual car trips.
Videos
Fast-forward video of the 24-hour vehicular mobility. Each dot represents one car, its speed matching its color (from bright red for still vehicles to bright blue for cars traveling at 90 km/h or more).
Publications
More information about the trace can be found in the following papers:
-
Sandesh Uppoor, Marco Fiore,
"Large-scale Urban Vehicular Mobility for Networking Research",
IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
November 2011 |
- Sandesh Uppoor, Marco Fiore, "Vehicular mobility in large-scale urban environments”, Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), Special Issue on Mobicom 2011 Student Research Competition posters, to appear.
Download
The 2 hour mobility trace (6am to 8am) is available for download here. We can provide the 24 hour mobility trace after your request is authorized by the TAPASCologne team, which can be contacted through the SUMO mailing list. The trace is compressed with xz, in order to minimize the download size.
The trace format is generic (i.e., not thought for use with a specific network simulator). More precisely, each line of the trace contains the time (with 1-second granularity), the vehicle identifier, its position on the two-dimensional plane (x and y coordinates in meters) and its speed (im meters per second).
This generic format can be easily translated to any network simulator format by parsing the trace with, e.g., perl or awk.
The source files used for the SUMO simulation are available for download at the official TAPASCologne website.
Contacts
Sandesh Uppoor
is a PhD student at INSA Lyon and a member of the
Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs - INRIA common lab.
Marco Fiore
is an Assistant Professor at INSA Lyon and a researcher at INRIA.
