Autobot: An Emulation Environment For Cellular Vehicular Communications

The rising interest in Intelligent Transportation Systems shines light on a complex task: The evaluation of new applications and services that could prevent accident, regulate traffic, and help the automotive industry in designing energy efficient vehicles. These applications will rely on a new communication channel between vehicles, infrastructure and cloud services, and will have to operate under various network performances. However, testing applications and services in real-life networks is costly and reproducing network behaviour in a controlled environment is challenging. Furthermore, simulation tools lack real-time evaluation capabilities. Therefore, we present in this paper an environment for the real-time emulation of cellular vehicular communications. It allows the user to rapidly and cost efficiently implement and test applications under realistic mobile network performances.