Salvatore Iandolo

Antonio Solida, Giovanni Gambigliani Zoccoli, Gaetano Orazio Cauchi et al.

Safety applications in vehicle-to-everything communications and Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems rely on reliable and timely message exchange, which in turn depends on accurate modeling of wireless signal propagation. Simulation frameworks such as VEINS are widely adopted to design and evaluate such systems before deployment; however, their realism strongly depends on the validity of the underlying channel and antenna models. This work presents an empirical validation of the VEINS simulator against real-world data collected from the MASA living laboratory. Using the default configuration, we compare Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), number of messages, and attenuation of the signal. The results show that VEINS systematically overestimates the RSSI value, while losing approximately 18% of the total number of messages received compared to the MASA, revealing inconsistencies between simulation and reality. The contribution of this study is a direct comparison between simulated and real world data, establishing a quantitative basis for future calibration of VEINS parameters to improve the fidelity of VANET simulations in C-ITS safety research.

Lorenzo Farina, Federico Gavioli, Salvatore Iandolo et al.

The automotive sector is following a revolutionary path from vehicles controlled by humans to vehicles that will be fully automated, fully connected, and ultimately fully cooperative. Along this road, new cooperative algorithms and protocols will be designed and field tested, which represents a great challenge in terms of costs. In this context, in particular, moving from simulations to practical experiments requires huge investments that are not always affordable and may become a barrier in some cases. To solve this issue and provide the community with an intermediate step, we here propose the use of 1:10 scaled cooperative, autonomous, and connected mini-cars. The mini-car is equipped with a Jetson Orin board running the open Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), sensors for autonomous operations, and a Raspberry Pi board for connectivity mounting the open source Open Stack for Car (OScar). A key aspect of the proposal is the use of OScar, which implements a full ETSI cooperative-intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) compliant stack. The feasibility and potential of the proposed platform is here demonstrated through the implementation of a case study where the Day-1 intersection collision warning (ICW) application is implemented and validated.