Networking Simulation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

8Highway Road Traffic Modeling for ITS Simulation

8.1. Introduction

Future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will rely heavily on new data transmission technologies, which will transform vehicles into actual communication hubs. Among such ITS-enabling technologies, those realizing direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication are the most disruptive. They are expected to interconnect vehicles into self-organized networks whose functions are fully distributed, and provide an important complement to the current mobile communication architecture, which is instead based on a radio access infrastructure that centralizes all data exchanges. Matter-of-factly, upcoming 5G networks will integrate traditional cellular and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) direct communication into a unifying framework that will allow users to benefit from the best of the two worlds. Specifically, V2V communication is expected to support services that require rapid, stateless, multicast transmissions, including, for example, collision avoidance, cooperative awareness or localized data dissemination.

After years of research and development, the deployment of V2V communication is now close: standards such as IEEE 802.11-2012¹, IEEE 1609², OSI CALM-M5³ and ETSI ITS-G5⁴ have been finalized, and regulators in the USA plan to enforce V2V radio interfaces on all new vehicles by 2017 [MAS 14]. Extensive field tests are also in progress: representative examples are the German sim^TD project in Europe and the Ann ...