Co-simulate no more: The CARLA V2X Sensor

Due to the increasing automation and connectivity of future, software-defined vehicles, there is a growing interest in safety in this area. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is a crucial aspect of this. However, testing V2X applications in the real environment poses a number of challenges, such as the cost of renting test tracks and integrating V2X technology. To develop and test V2X applications more cheaply and at early development stages, simulation is a key enabler. There are several open-source tools that can simulate V2X communication, but a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution that enables to simulate V2X communication combined with sensor data required for automated driving is missing. Therefore, this paper presents an open-source approach that extends the CARLA simulation platform with a new module to create a unified environment for developing V2X applications in simulation. Different parameters can be set individually to account for real-world sensor’s differences. Mechanisms for generating, transmitting and receiving Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) are implemented. For the transmission, different propagation models are included, taking into account the outlines of vehicles and buildings: Line of sight (LOS), non-line of sight due to vehicles (NLOSv) and non-line of sight due to static objects (NLOSb). We perform a benchmark measurement with a varying number of simulated vehicles, indicating that simulating the V2X communication introduces only a small overhead to the simulated sensors, such as cameras. The code for the V2X additions to CARLA is available online.