Incorporating telecommunication features for V2I and I2V in microscopic traffic simulation

Sammanfattning

Future traffic-management strategies are expected to rely more heavily on the exchange of information between vehicles and infrastructure through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. This exchange can enable more detailed and proactive control, but its potential advantages should be carefully evaluated before deployment. Microscopic traffic simulation is commonly used for this purpose, but it does not itself capture the unreliability of such wireless communication. As a result, studies often either assume perfect and instant communication, which can overestimate the benefits, or use traffic–network co-simulation, which can add more complexity than needed for this purpose. Based on a review of analytical communication models, this thesis investigates which effects of non-ideal wireless communication are most relevant for traffic-management applications relying on Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V) communication. It also examines how analytical models can represent these effects in microscopic traffic simulation as a lightweight alternative to co-simulation. The focus is on preserving only the effects that matter for traffic-control evaluation, so communication quality can influence both the information available to the controller and the instructions applied to vehicles. The main thesis contribution is a software module that allows one to represent packet loss and Medium Access Control (MAC) access delay effects within microscopic traffic simulation using these analytical models. The module is placed between the traffic simulator and a traffic-control application, where it modifies the timing and delivery of simulated V2I and I2V messages before they are consumed by the application or applied to vehicles. In a controlled operating-point analysis, the evaluation shows that V2I and I2V communication degrade in different ways: V2I is mainly limited by packet loss, while I2V is sensitive to MAC access delay. In a simulated motorway merge-assist case study, the degradation of the V2I stream caused by signal propagation is the main mechanism affecting the controller's traffic-state estimation and the timing of traffic-control measures. These results demonstrate that the abstraction is detailed enough to propagate the effects of degraded communication into the perception and control actions of the controller. The implemented module can therefore be used as a screening layer before investing in more detailed co-simulation.