Performance Analysis of C-V2X Mode 4 Communication Introducing an Open-Source C-V2X Simulator

Autonomous vehicles, on the ground and in the air, are the next big evolution in human mobility. While autonomous driving in highway scenarios is already possible using only the vehicles sensors, the complex scenarios of big cities with all its different traffic participants is still a vision. Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communication is a necessary enabler of this vision and and an emerging field of interest in today's research. However, to the best of our knowledge open source simulators essential for open research do not exist yet. In this work we present our open source C-V2X mode 4 simulator based on the discrete-event network simulator ns-3. To analyze the performance of C-V2X mode 4 using our simulator, we created a worst case scenario and the 3GPP reference Manhattan grid scenario using the microscopic traffic simulator SUMO. We also added the WINNER+ B1 channel model to ns-3, as this is also used by 3GPP. Our results show, that C-V2X is scalable to 250 vehicles within a worst case scenario on a playground of 100 m x 100 m, with respect to the LTE rel. 14 V2X requirements. For the more realistic Manhattan grid scenario, the performance is better, as to be expected. We also analyzed the Packet Inter-Reception time with an outcome of max. 100 ms for more than 99 % of all transmissions. In addition, we investigated the impact of the Resource Reservation Period and the Resource Reselection Probability on the system's Packet Reception Ratio.