Pedestrians also Have Something to Say: Integration of Connected VRU in Bidirectional Simulations

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in researching and developing vehicular networking protocols and safety applications that consider the inclusion of Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) in their design. In this work, we present a methodology that enables the inclusion of connected VRU in the well-known VEINS framework. We describe the main problems found during the integration of VRU and the necessary fixes required at the time of launching the simulation environment. The integration contributes to better understand the behavior of both connected vehicles and connected VRU in Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems. The methodology has been tested with vehicular scenarios at intersections using DSRC in both vehicles and VRU, but it is also compatible with other technologies (e.g., vehicular networking supported by 5G and heterogeneous networking architectures), facilitating the connectivity from the VRU. Furthermore, with the VRU integration in the VEINS framework, it is possible to exploit the benefits of bidirectional simulations to gather traffic data, build communications networks and protocols that consider VRU, and decide over traffic dynamics at both vehicles and VRU. The tool is publicly available to the research community and continues under development.