Simulation-based Evaluation of a Remotely Operated Road Vehicle under Transmission Delays and Denial-of-Service Attacks

A remotely operated road vehicle (RORV) refers to a vehicle operated wirelessly from a remote location. In this paper, we report results from an evaluation of two safety mechanisms: safe braking and disconnection. These safety mechanisms are included in the control software for RORV developed by Roboauto, an intelligent mobility solutions provider. The safety mechanisms monitor the communication system to detect packet transmission delays, lost messages, and outages caused by naturally occurring interference as well as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. When the delay in the communication channel exceeds certain threshold values, the safety mechanisms are to initiate control actions to reduce the vehicle speed or stop the affected vehicle safely as soon as possible. To evaluate the effectiveness of the safety mechanisms, we exposed the vehicle control software to various communication failures using a software-in-the-loop (SIL) testing environment developed specifically for this study. Our results show that the safety mechanisms behaved correctly for a vast majority of the simulated communication failures. However, in a few cases, we noted that the safety mechanisms were triggered incorrectly, either too early or too late, according to the system specification.