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Vehicular wireless networks are gaining commercial interest. Mobile connectivity, road safety, and traffic congestion management are some applications that have arisen with this networking paradigm. Existing research primarily focuses on developing mobility models and evaluating routing protocols in ideal open-field environments. It provides limited information of whether vehicular networks can be deployed in an urban setting. This thesis evaluates the practicality of deployment scenarios for a vehicular ad hoc network with a wireless mesh infrastructure support. The deployment scenarios include: (1) a mesh-enhanced peer-to-peer ad hoc routing deployment model where both the mobile nodes and static wireless infrastructure nodes participate in routing, (2) a mesh-enhanced infrastructural routing deployment model where only the static wireless infrastructure nodes participate in routing and (3) a scenario where static wireless infrastructure nodes in deployments (1) and (2) have the ability to communicate over multiple wireless channels. These deployment scenarios are evaluated with a mobility model that restricts the movement of vehicles to street boundaries based on real world maps and imposes simple traffic rules. This study also proposes a method of capturing the effect of obstacles on wireless communication based on empirical experiments in urban environments. The results indicate that (1) the mesh-enhanced infrastructural routing deployment yields significantly better performance compared to mesh enhanced peer-to-peer ad hoc routing deployment; (2) in the mesh-enhanced infrastructural routing deployment scenario increasing the density of infrastructure nodes is beneficial while increasing the density of mobile nodes has no significant effect; (3) in the mesh-enhanced peer-to-peer ad hoc routing deployment scenario, higher density of infrastructure nodes as well as mobile nodes can lead to decreased performance; (4) using multiple channels of communication on infrastructure nodes yields highly increased performance; and (5) the effect of obstacles could be represented in simulations through parameters, which could be set based on empirical experiments.
