A Lightweight Cross-Layer Cooperative Testbed for Evaluation of Connected Vehicles

The system of connected vehicles can be considered as a complicated cyber-physical system, which will be fully provided with the ability of cooperative awareness, adaptive communication and collaborative control in future intelligent transportation systems. It is now imminent to consider how to construct a set of comprehensive evaluation system so that the key technology of connected vehicles can be effectively tested and verified. In this contribution a lightweight testbed framework for connected vehicles was proposed based on the cyber-physical fusion and hardware-in-loop simulation technology. Miniature vehicles were developed as the physical prototype equipped with Arduino microprocessor, ZigBee radio module and other sensing elements. Some typical cooperative scenarios can be evaluated using the miniature vehicles under indoor laboratory environments. Through collaborative information interaction between physical layer and top layer, the synchronized simulation measurement can be realized in a virtual scenario of connected vehicles. Owing to the coordination between physical nodes and simulated ones, the testbed will be possessed of flexibility, scalability and practicability. Some experimental results presented in this contribution indicate the proposed testbed is feasible and reasonable. This research is beneficial to develop more intelligent connected vehicles in the near future.