A Simulation Framework for Prototyping Intelligent Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Applications: A Case Study on RSU-Based Intersection Movement Assist for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

A cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) enables information sharing among ITS subsystems, such as vehicle and roadside infrastructure, with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. Novel C-ITS applications aim to reduce traffic congestion and improve road safety. For example, a roadside unit (RSU) can sense the traffic status of an intersection and share the information to nearby vehicles to prevent potential collision, i.e., the intersection movement assist (IMA) scenario. Typically, C-ITS applications are developed in a simulated world to mitigate the high costs and safety hazards associated with the real-world counterpart. Unfortunately, existing simulation tools focus primarily on modeling vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, rather than the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications involved in the above example. This poses a great challenge for developing V2I-based applications, especially for the application-level performance assessment on such systems. This work proposes a software framework that enables the simulation of full software stacks for the ITS subsystems, i.e., vehicle and RSU. This full-stack simulation capability enables hardware-in-the-loop simulations, evaluating the application-level performance and relative cost in the early stage of system development. This can shorten the time to market for C-ITS applications. We believe that this framework paves the way toward the development of novel V2I applications.