GPU accelerated ray launching for high-fidelity virtual test drives of VANET applications

Due to the complexity of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, future driving assistance systems need to be validated through virtual test drives in a simulated environment. An accurate modeling of the vehicle-to-vehicle communication channel is crucial to enable a precise evaluation of such network-aware applications. Since existing ray-based methods cause long computation times, a new parallel GPU-based ray-launching simulation method is presented. The algorithmic improvements allow a high utilization of the GPU computing power, which results in significantly faster simulations while achieving high accuracy. The validation of the simulation results against real-world measurements showed a high level of agreement.