Vehicle to Everything (V2X) technology has been studied extensively in the past years. Limited pilot and production deployments, and research work have demonstrated V2X benefits. These include improvement to safety, mobility conditions and environmental benefits. Several safety and mobility applications have been investigated in literature. Nonetheless, V2X holds a potential for broader innovation in connected and automated vehicle applications. Feasibility assessment and algorithm validation of such applications may prove to be challenging. This results from costs associated with test track rental and equipping vehicles with V2X technology. Besides, limited V2X penetration rate leads to unavailability of naturalistic testing environment.
In this paper, we investigate the use of the autonomous vehicle simulation, named Carla, for V2X application validation. Carla is an open source project that we altered to enable V2X applications assessment. We built a V2X virtualization platform, by modifying Carla, to enable an On-Board Unit (OBU) in the loop testing. Our work builds on the advances of the autonomous vehicle simulation by developing a V2X interface to link to an external OBU. Examples for such advances include, physical phenomena and sensors representation. Two applications were studied as use cases: Emergency Vehicle Alert (EVA) and High Beam Assist (HBA). True positive, false negative and Time To Collision (TTC) metrics were used to assess the applications performance. Basic application testing shows a true positive rate of more than 97% and a false negative rate of less than 1% for EVA and HBA. A GPS inaccuracy tolerance test was performed to demonstrate the versatility of this implementation. A random error with predetermined variance was injected to the GPS coordinates of the vehicle in the simulation. In addition, effects of lossy channel were studied by varying the Packet Error Rate (PER). Results from the GPS and lossy channel tests are shared in the text.