Integrated simulator platform for evaluation of vehicular communication applications

Recently new vehicular safety systems, such as vehicle-vehicle/vehicle-infrastructure cooperative systems have been proposed for reducing traffic accidents. Effectiveness of the proposed systems can be tested by means of traditional field tests, however, such field tests prove to be extremely costly despite having low scalability and low repeatability.. If accurate and efficient vehicular communication simulation tools can be developed, then such tools would fill in the gap where field tests remain inadequate. Development and evaluation of complex vehicular communication applications would benefit tremendously from efficient simulations. However, evaluation of such vehicular safety applications would require the use and coordination of multiple simulators, each having its own intrinsic timing and relationship attributes. In this paper we describe the structure and operation of the Integrated Simulation Platform (ISP) which we have developed for the purposes mentioned above. ISP integrates a traffic simulator to determine the location of the vehicle for each time step, a network simulator to evaluate communication between the On Board Unit (OBU) s and Road Side Unit (RSU) s; and a propagation prediction engine to estimate wireless transmission quality. We also present preliminary simulation results of a case study evaluating a potential vehicular safety application where we show the effectiveness of a cooperative V2V/V2I application.