SDR-based open-source C-V2X traffic generator for stress testing vehicular communication

In 2021 IEEE 93rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Spring), Helsinki, Finland, April 2021

Abstract:

Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communication is an essential component of future automated traffic systems. As vehicular communication is safety-critical, C-V2X is designed to be reliable and highly scalable. To analyze the C-V2X communication performance in experimental setups, a huge number of communication nodes are necessary, and those large setups become complex and expensive, and creating repeatable results in these huge experimental setups is hard. In research, communication system independent software-based traffic generators are often used to analyze the scalability of a communication system. However, these traffic generators are limited by the restrictions of the underlying communication technology. In this work, a Software-Defined Radio (SDR)-based open-source C-V2X traffic generator is presented. The traffic generator allows repeatable scalability experiments using fewer communication nodes by creating valid C-V2X communication traffic that mimics multiple C-V2X communication nodes. Experimental results using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) C-V2X modems show that the achieved results correspond to the expected behavior. In addition, these experimental results are compared to the simulation results of our C-V2X simulator. The comparison shows that if the C-V2X traffic generator limits the channel resources, the PRR does almost exactly match the simulation results. The proposed C-V2X traffic generator’s functionality is further confirmed by the very small difference in the Packet Inter-Reception time of only 0.4 % for around 250 vehicles.