A SUMO-Based Hardware-in-the-Loop V2X Simulation Framework for Testing and Rapid Prototyping of Cooperative Vehicular Applications

Vehicle-to-Anything (V2X) technologies aim at providing globally standardized communication tools to efficiently transmit information between all players of the transportation ecosystem. Based on such extensive data exchange between traffic objects V2X helps to create an advanced domain of transportation called Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) where an ever-growing scale of cooperative vehicular applications/services facilitate enhanced safety and comfort on the road and lead towards fully automated transportation in the future. C-ITS relies on a complex architecture consisting of a cross-layer optimized sophisticated protocol stack, hybrid radio access solutions, computing algorithms, decision schemes, special interfaces, internet-of-things (IoT) integration, etc. Moreover, C-ITS and the support of cooperative use-cases demand high reliability, enhanced Quality of Service/Quality of Experience (QoS/QoE), and rock-solid hardware/software implementations working efficiently and securely even in the most complicated environments including extreme traffic circumstances or unpredictable actions. Therefore, deliberate system testing is a crucial and strategic process, especially when we are closing to the wide-scale deployment phase of real-life C-ITS solutions. Our proposed hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) V2X simulation framework was designed to offer a cost-efficient and simple toolset for testing and rapid prototyping of cooperative vehicular solutions by partially replacing costly, time-consuming and oftentimes dangerous field tests with an easy to install, tabletop laboratory test- and development suite.