Resumen:
In the next years, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are expected to become a reality and a great number of interesting applications for drivers and passengers will be developed (related to safety, comfort, and entertainment). In all these applications, the acquisition, management and an efficient and effective exchange of data will be key issues. Therefore, significant data management challenges arise in this context. We argue that mobile agent technology could play an important role as a middleware for the development of applications for vehicular networks, as they naturally support disconnected operations and distributed data management. Overall, a development of solutions based on agents that autonomously take decisions may be promising. A significant problem arises when we need to evaluate a data management approach for vehicular networks. Deploying it in the real-world in order to evaluate the proposal with real cars is impractical and very expensive, and so field tests are limited to very small-scale and controlled scenarios, mainly as a proof of concept. Instead, simulators are usually used for experimental evaluation. However, existing simulators for vehicular networks do not directly support testing data management techniques based on the use of mobile agents. In this paper, we present a simulator that offers interesting functionalities for that context. The simulator has been developed in a quite generic and extensible way, in order to facilitate its use in a variety of scenarios to test different data management approaches.