Simulation Platform For Connected Heterogeneous Vehicles

The increasing number of connectivity features in current vehicles poses additional challenges for large-scale vehicular communication systems. Already deployed systems rely on the cellular network infrastructure, while the Wifi-based 802.11p standard will likely be implemented on a large scale in the next years. As real-world tests are costly, simulations are used to develop mechanisms for efficient short-range communication via 802.11p. However, efficient long-range communication between vehicles is pivotal for non-safety related information sharing. Current simulators often focus on short-range communication exchange, while approaches for efficient long-range communication are barely considered in automotive scenarios.To enable rapid development of new approaches, we propose a scalable simulation environment for automotive applications. Our contributions are (i) the realistic modeling of heterogeneous vehicles including sensors and network interfaces, (ii) the automated generation of road properties like accidents and jams, and (iii) a configurable back-end infrastructure distributing events to the vehicles. All of the above contributions enable rapid prototyping and evaluation of automotive applications in various environments. We showcase two exemplary use cases to demonstrate the versatility of our simulation framework: an efficient road-based dissemination approach for long-range information exchange and a distributed information validation approach.