SMART: A Holistic Simulation Framework for End-to-End V2X Communication

Efficient Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication can revolutionize road safety by enabling real-time data exchange among vehicles and/or infrastructure. However, due to the ever changing conditions, the performance of V2X communications is significantly susceptible to increased delays, particularly regarding the uplink network traffic where, for example, a large number of vehicles transmit data concurrently to a central system during rush hours. This paper presents SMART, a holistic simulation framework developed to investigate the impact of vehicular traffic on modern V2X communication with special interest on delay-sensitive applications. It integrates state of the art simulation environments and appropriate libraries designed to support a wide range of network topologies, communication protocols, channel models and mobility patterns. Specifically, our framework offers a facility accounting for vehicles’ speed and acceleration, as well as wireless signal quality (Channel Quality Indicator-CQI and Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio-SINR), that affect end-to-end network delay. For our study, we introduce two realistic scenarios, namely the single-vehicle and multiple-vehicles scenario, in which we define three vehicles’ classes, i.e., Slow, Fast and Emergency; we configure vehicular traffic density to correspond to Typical, Busy and Night hours, and we specify the routes followed by the vehicles within a real road infrastructure. In our simulations we calculate mean delays below 100 ms which are aligned with the delay requirements of many V2X applications. Our results show that heavy vehicular traffic has the most significant impact on the delay indicating the need for mechanisms that dynamically prioritize traffic related to safety-critical application.