Integration of C-V2X Into a Hybrid Testbed to Co-Simulate ITS Applications and Scenarios

Distributed systems pervade the everyday life and become more relevant for efficiency and comfort, but also safety. Their development is challenged by increasing heterogeneity of hardware, software, and the increased need for interaction and compatibility. For instance, for vehicular communication in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs), WiFi and cellular based technologies (ITS-G5 and C-V2X) compete and co-exist. We ad-dress end-to-end testing of such highly connected applications in combination with hardware and complex environments. Related testbeds cover many aspects but lack support to integrate virtual nodes, physical nodes, and co-simulations all together. This work contributes 1) the integration of Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) simulation using ns-3 into the hybrid co-simulation framework Marvis; 2) the use of C-V2X on a software-defined radio (SDR) for ITS scenarios in Marvis; 3) an integration of the aforementioned with the competing V2X standard ITS-5G. The evaluation of this open source implementation is based on a currently relevant use case of the DiAK project, a digitized railroad crossing, in which both simulated and physical C-V2X communication are included in the scenario. The measured values recorded in the process show that Marvis can be used for developing and analyzing realistic ITS simulations. The necessary adjustments to the ns-3 C-V2X simulator increase the message transmission latency by only 0.8 ms (or 1.4 %) and can therefore be neglected.