Performance Evaluation of Coded Cooperation System Using Software-Defined Radios

One of the groundbreaking innovations that are predicted to revolutionize transportation in the future and improve the quality of life is autonomous driving. To ensure on-road safety in such scenarios, the reliable exchange of basic safety messages (BSMs) is important, which has been an ever-growing challenge owing to the rising traffic density. The introduction of network-coded cooperation (NCC) in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) scenarios has greatly enhanced the performance of vehicular networks in terms of bit error rate (BER) and throughput. Such technologies need to be implemented and validated comprehensively before being deployed in real-life transportation systems to meet the required quality-of-service (QoS). However, due to the inherent complexities of hardware, the practical implementation of NCC has been less explored. In this article, we, thus, implement an NCC-based system practically using multiple universal software radio peripheral (USRP) devices to serve as the onboard units (OBUs). Workflows have been proposed based on which the USRPs have been designed. To check the authenticity of the proposed workflows in providing reliability, metrics such as BER and throughput are considered for the work. The results obtained are compared with other relevant schemes. Despite the complicated nature and stochasticity of the hardware implementation, the findings obtained via multiple iterations indicate enhanced BER improvements of 10.956% and 2.888%, and throughput gains of 9.6% and 1.32%, over the relayed and direct paths, respectively. These gains in reliability and throughput are vital for vehicular systems. Finally, to acquire additional insights, the results obtained using USRP have been compared with their respective simulation results, which show an impressive correlation with each other by following a similar trend.