Quality of Service in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Methodical Evaluation and Enhancements for ITS-G5

After many formative years, the ad hoc wireless communication between vehicles has become a vehicular technology available in mass production cars in 2020. Vehicles form spontaneous Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), which enable communication whenever vehicles are nearby without need for supportive infrastructure. In Europe, this communication is standardised comprehensively as Intelligent Transport Systems in the 5.9 GHz band (ITS-G5). This thesis centres around Quality of Service (QoS) in these VANETs based on ITS-G5 technology. Whilst only a few vehicles communicate, radio resources are plenty, and channel congestion is a minor issue. With progressing deployment, congestion control becomes crucial to preserve QoS by preventing high latencies or foiled information dissemination. The developed VANET simulation model, featuring an elaborated ITS-G5 protocol stack, allows investigation of QoS methodically. It also considers the characteristics of ITS-G5 radios such as the signal attenuation in vehicular environments and the capture effect by receivers. Backed by this simulation model, several enhancements for ITS-G5 are proposed to control congestion reliably and thus ensure QoS for its applications. Modifications at the GeoNetworking (GN) protocol prevent massive packet occurrences in a short time and hence congestion. Glow Forwarding is introduced as GN extension to distribute delay-tolerant information. The revised Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) cross-layer supports low-latency transmission of event-triggered, periodic and relayed packets. DCC triggers periodic services and manages a shared duty cycle budget dedicated to packet forwarding for this purpose. Evaluation in large-scale networks reveals that this enhanced ITS-G5 system can reliably reduce the information age of periodically sent messages. The forwarding budget virtually eliminates the starvation of multi-hop packets and still avoids congestion caused by excessive forwarding. The presented enhancements thus pave the way to scale up VANETs for wide-spread deployment and future applications

AuNa: Modularly Integrated Simulation Framework for Cooperative Autonomous Navigation

In the near future, the development of autonomous driving will get more complex as the vehicles will not only rely on their own sensors but also communicate with other vehicles and the infrastructure to cooperate and improve the driving experience. Towards this, several research areas, such as robotics, communication, and control, are required to collaborate in order to implement future-ready methods. However, each area focuses on the development of its own components first, while the effects the components may have on the whole system are only considered at a later stage. In this work, we integrate the simulation tools of robotics, communication and control namely ROS2, OMNeT++, and MATLAB to evaluate cooperative driving scenarios. The framework can be utilized to develop the individual components using the designated tools, while the final evaluation can be conducted in a complete scenario, enabling the simulation of advanced multi-robot applications for cooperative driving. Furthermore, it can be used to integrate additional tools, as the integration is done in a modular way. We showcase the framework by demonstrating a platooning scenario under cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) and the ETSI ITS-G5 communication architecture. Additionally, we compare the differences of the controller performance between the theoretical analysis and practical case study.Comment: 8 pages, preprint, https://github.com/tu-dortmund-ls12-rt/AuN

Impact of radio channel characteristics on the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in critical car-following situations

Truck platooning is an application of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) which relies on vehicle-to-vehicle communications facilitated by vehicle ad-hoc networks. Communication uncertainties can affect the performance of a CACC controller. Previous research has not considered the full spectrum of possible car-following scenarios needed to understand how the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons would be affected by changes in the communication network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of radio channel parameters on the string stability and collision avoidance capabilities of a CACC controller governing the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in a majority of critical car-following situations. We develop and use a novel, sophisticated and open-source VANET simulator OTS-Artery, which brings microscopic traffic simulation, network simulation, and psychological concepts in a single environment, for our investigations. Our results indicate that string stability and safety of truck platoons are mostly affected in car-following situations where truck platoons accelerate from the standstill to the maximum speed and decelerate from the maximum speed down to the standstill. The findings suggest that string stability can be improved by increasing transmission power and lowering receiver sensitivity. However, the safety of truck platoons seems to be sensitive to the choice of the path loos model

Improved Security Performance for VANET Simulations

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Upcoming deployments of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) in Europe are expected to sign and verify packets secured by cryptographic signatures by default. Thus, when VANET simulations are used for development and test of applications building upon vehicular communication, the overhead induced by security extensions to the ITS-G5 protocol stack shall not be neglected. This paper presents a standard compliant simulation model capable to handle secured messages. Beside its suitability for Hardware-in-the-Loop simulations employing secured communication, the model's major advantage is the minimisation of the simulation environment's performance penalty linked with cryptographic computations

Simulating LTE-Enabled Vehicular Communications

In the next years, cellular networks are expected to foster the development of inter-vehicle communication supporting advanced driver-assistance systems and self-driving cars. The evaluation of such systems can be performed via OMNeT++, which supports two independent frameworks for simulating Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications and Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, i.e., Artery and SimuLTE. The aim of this chapter is to combine Artery and SimuLTE in order to simulate V2X services relying on cellular communications. First, we describe the main challenges that are encountered when integrating the two frameworks. Then, considering the use case of vehicles that need to be warned when approaching a black ice region, we provide two tutorials that describe the configuration of networks and parameters, the implementation of the V2X service, and the collection of simulations results. The first tutorial focuses on vehicles exploiting the cellular infrastructure to communicate with a remote server, to be informed about the danger zone. In the second tutorial, vehicles detecting a traction loss exploit LTE’s Device-to-Device (D2D) capabilities to rapidly distribute the alert to all the vehicles in proximity

Measuring the Realtime Capability of Parallel-Discrete-Event-Simulations

Speeding up Discrete Event Simulations (DESs) is a broad research field. Promising Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) approaches with optimistic and conservative synchronisation schemes have emerged throughout the years. However, in the area of real-time simulation, PDESs are rarely considered. This is caused by the complex problem of fitting parallel executed DES models to a real-time clock. Hence, this paper gives an extensive review of existing conservative and optimistic synchronisation schemes for PDESs. It introduces a metric to compare their real-time capabilities to determine whether they can be used for soft or firm real-time simulation. Examples are given on how to apply this metric to evaluate PDESs using synthetic and real-world examples. The results of the investigation reveal that no final answer can be given if PDESs can be used for soft or firm real-time simulation as they are. However, boundary conditions were defined, which allow a use-case specific evaluation of the real-time capabilities of a certain parallel executed DES. Using this in-depth knowledge and can lead to predictability of the real-time behaviour of a simulation run

Enhanced Inter-Vehicular relative positioning

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications for integral and cooperative vehicle safety as well as some Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) benefit from precise determination of relative positions between dynamic traffic objects. With conventional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements, e.g. using Global Positioning System (GPS), the required accuracy cannot be achieved. For this reason, an exchange of GNSS observations via Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is proposed in this paper. In particular, the European Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocol stack ITS-G5 is employed. With these exchanged GNSS observations, Differential GNSS (DGNSS) or Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) calculations provide a precise relative position vector. However, due to relative movement of traffic objects, this position vector becomes obsolete for increasing transmission delays. For this reason, a mitigating kinematic model is set up and validated experimentally. With respect to fixed RTK solutions, this kinematic model reduces the errors by an average of 61% compared to position calculations ignoring IVC latency

Impact of radio channel characteristics on the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in critical car-following situations

Truck platooning is an application of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) which relies on vehicle-to-vehicle communications facilitated by vehicle ad-hoc networks. Communication uncertainties can affect the performance of a CACC controller. Previous research has not considered the full spectrum of possible car-following scenarios needed to understand how the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons would be affected by changes in the communication network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of radio channel parameters on the string stability and collision avoidance capabilities of a CACC controller governing the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in a majority of critical car-following situations. We develop and use a novel, sophisticated and open-source VANET simulator OTS-Artery, which brings microscopic traffic simulation, network simulation, and psychological concepts in a single environment, for our investigations. Our results indicate that string stability and safety of truck platoons are mostly affected in car-following situations where truck platoons accelerate from the standstill to the maximum speed and decelerate from the maximum speed down to the standstill. The findings suggest that string stability can be improved by increasing transmission power and lowering receiver sensitivity. However, the safety of truck platoons seems to be sensitive to the choice of the path loos model.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Transport and PlanningPolicy Analysi