# Lightweight Simulation of Hybrid Aerial- and Ground-based Vehicular Communication Networks

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight simulation framework for hybrid aerial and ground vehicular networks, enabling efficient testing of UAV and ground vehicle communication in dynamic environments.

## Contribution

It presents a novel integrated simulation approach coupling aerial and ground networks, facilitating development of context-aware optimization methods for hybrid vehicular scenarios.

## Key findings

- UAVs can serve as local sensors and base stations in simulations.
- LTE and C-V2X are compared for hybrid communication performance.
- The framework supports analysis of interdependencies between aerial and ground networks.

## Abstract

Cooperating small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will open up new application fields within next-generation Intelligent Transportation Sytems (ITSs), e.g., airborne near field delivery. In order to allow the exploitation of the potentials of hybrid vehicular scenarios, reliable and efficient bidirectional communication has to be guaranteed in highly dynamic environments. For addressing these novel challenges, we present a lightweight framework for integrated simulation of aerial and ground-based vehicular networks. Mobility and communication are natively brought together using a shared codebase coupling approach, which catalyzes the development of novel context-aware optimization methods that exploit interdependencies between both domains. In a proof-of-concept evaluation, we analyze the exploitation of UAVs as local aerial sensors as well as aerial base stations. In addition, we compare the performance of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) for connecting the ground- and air-based vehicles.