Simulating Vehicle Movement and Multi-Hop Connectivity from Basic Safety Messages

The Basic Safety Message (BSM) is a standardized communication packet that is sent every tenth of a second between connected vehicles using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). BSMs contain data about the sending vehicle's state, such as speed, location, and the status of the turn signal [1]. Presently, many BSM datasets from various United States locations are available through the connected vehicle testbeds of U.S. Department of Transportation. However, without a proper visualization tool, it is not possible to analyze or obtain a visual overview of the spatio-temporal distribution of the data. For this purpose, a web application has been developed which can ingest a raw BSM dataset and display a time-based simulation of vehicle movement. The simulation also displays multi-hop vehicular network connectivity for DSRC. This paper gives details about the application, including an explanation of the multi-hop partitioning algorithm used to classify the vehicles into separate network partitions. A performance analysis for the simulation is included, in which it is suggested that calculating a connectivity matrix with the multi-hop partitioning algorithm is computationally expensive for a large number of vehicles.