SDR-Based Communication Sniffing for Determining the Proliferation of ITS-G5

This paper describes the measurement setup for the proliferation of the vehicular communication systems in operating cars. The setup builds on a communication sniffer which detects cooperative awareness messages broadcast from ETSI ITS-G5 systems, decodes them and records the public information in these messages. The experimental characterization of the setup in an outdoor scenario is presented in order to verify the sniffer's performance with respect to transmit power and communication range. The setup is deployed for measurements on a busy road with slow moving traffic in the center of the city of Linz, Austria. The number of active users as well as their transmit power, duration of the transmission and packet length have been recorded.