A future car-to-x communication system has to fulfil a lot of different requirements concerning high performance and functionality that are given by the field of application. To be able to optimize the system architecture regarding these constraints an intensive architecture evaluation and investigation is necessary.
Within this paper a simulative approach for comprehensive design space exploration, verification, and test of a car-to-x communication unit is presented. The proposed simulation environment allows for a flexible adaption to the test case by being able to interconnect an arbitrary number of simulators of different type and different granularity. As a novelty complete embedded car-to-x systems can be investigated by integrating several SystemC based architecture models into an environmental simulation and observing their behavior and interaction. We introduce the concept of scaling in combination with a hybrid simulation approach which allows eliminating unnecessary details of simulation. So an aimed investigation with maximum possible simulation performance can be done which is the basis for an extensive architecture optimization. The simulation can optionally be executed in real-time. This enables a connection of real car-to-x hardware for advanced verification.