Small-Scale Testbed for Evaluating C-V2X Applications on 5G Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a small-scale testbed designed to facilitate the development and real-world performance evaluation of C-V2X applications on 5G networks, including vehicle platforms and intelligent transport system components.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel small-scale testbed integrating vehicle platforms and ITS agents to accelerate C-V2X application testing on 5G networks.

Findings

Testbed effectively evaluates shared situational awareness applications.

Reduces time and effort for C-V2X application prototyping.

Demonstrates real-world performance evaluation capabilities.

Abstract

In this work, we present a small-scale testbed for evaluating the real-life performance of cellular V2X (C-V2X) applications on 5G cellular networks. Despite the growing interest and rapid technology development for V2X applications, researchers still struggle to prototype V2X applications with real wireless networks, hardware, and software in the loop in a controlled environment. To help alleviate this challenge, we present a testbed designed to accelerate development and evaluation of C-V2X applications on 5G cellular networks. By including a small-scale vehicle platform into the testbed design, we significantly reduce the time and effort required to test new C-V2X applications on 5G cellular networks. With a focus around the integration of small-scale vehicle platforms, we detail the design decisions behind the full software and hardware setup of commonly needed intelligent transport system agents (e.g. sensors, servers, vehicles). Moreover, to showcase the testbed's capability to produce industrially-relevant, real world performance evaluations, we present an evaluation of a simple test case inspired from shared situational awareness. Finally, we discuss the upcoming use of the testbed for evaluating 5G cellular network-based shared situational awareness and other C-V2X applications.