Real-Time Hardware-In-the-Loop Emulation Framework for DSRC-based Connected Vehicle Applications

The rapid growth of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) solutions have made a significant impact on the safety of intelligent transportation systems. However, similar to any other emerging technology, thorough testing and evaluation studies are of paramount importance for the effectiveness of these solutions. Due to the safety-critical nature of this problem, large-scale real-world field tests do not seem to be a feasible and practical option. Thus, employing simulation and emulation approaches are preferred in the development phase of the safety-related applications in CAVs. Such methodologies not only mitigate the high cost of deploying large number of real vehicles, but also enable researchers to exhaustively perform repeatable tests in various scenarios. Software simulation of very large-scale vehicular scenarios is mostly a time consuming task and as a matter of fact, any simulation environment would include abstractions in order to model the real-world system. In contrast to the simulation-based solutions, network emulators are able to produce more realistic test environments. In this work, we propose a high-fidelity hardware-in-the-loop remote vehicle emulator (RVE) framework in order to create testing environments for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. We put particular emphasis on the real-time communication simulation module (RTCSim) within RVE. The proposed RTCSim is able to run accurately in real-time fashion in contrast to other existing systems, which can potentially boost the development and validation of V2V systems.