Latency-aware C-ITS application for improving the road safety with CAM messages on the Smart Highway testbed

The Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS) testbed or simplified called the Smart Highway (Antwerp, Belgium) is designed to facilitate research in the area of distributed/edge computing and vehicular communications. The Smart Highway testbed deploys the Cooperative Awareness Basic Service to exchange Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) between road C-ITS entities, e.g., C-ITS vehicles and Road-Side Units (RSUs). CAMs support vehicular safety and traffic efficiency applications by providing them with the continuous status information of relevant C-ITS entities. Therefore, it is important that those messages are delivered with low latency, especially the CAMs that originate from special vehicles, e.g., emergency vehicles, police cars, and fire trucks. In this paper, we research the impact of CAM messages configuration on the communication latency among vehicles. Moreover, we have performed the practical experimentation to evaluate the aforementioned impact, using ITSG5 and LTE-V2X system under realistic vehicular conditions, on the Smart Highway testbed located in Antwerp.