Simulating Vehicle Movement and Multi-Hop Connectivity from Basic Safety Messages

TL;DR

This paper presents a web-based simulation tool for visualizing vehicle movements and multi-hop connectivity using BSM data, aiding analysis of connected vehicle networks.

Contribution

It introduces a visualization application that ingests BSM datasets and displays vehicle movement and multi-hop connectivity, including a novel multi-hop partitioning algorithm.

Findings

The simulation effectively visualizes vehicle trajectories and network partitions.

Multi-hop partitioning algorithm's computational cost increases with vehicle count.

Performance analysis highlights the need for optimization in large-scale scenarios.

Abstract

The Basic Safety Message (BSM) is a standardized communication packet that is sent every tenth of a second between connected vehicles using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). BSMs contain data about the sending vehicle's state, such as speed, location, and the status of the turn signal. Currently, many BSM datasets are available through the connected vehicle testbeds of U.S. Department of Transportation from all over the country. However, without a proper visualization tool, it is not possible to analyze or visually get an overview of the spatio-temporal distribution of the data. With this goal, a web application has been developed which can ingest a raw BSM dataset and display a time-based simulation of vehicle movement. The simulation also displays multi-hop vehicular network connectivity over DSRC. This paper gives details about the application, including an explanation of the multi-hop partitioning algorithm used to classify the vehicles into separate network partitions. A performance analysis for the simulation is included, in which it is suggested that calculating a connectivity matrix with the multi-hop partitioning algorithm is computationally expensive for large number of vehicles.