Interlinking Vissim and ns-3 for Connected Vehicle Simulation: Case Study of Intelligent Dilemma Zone Avoidance

The effects of realistic wireless communication are important for the modeling and evaluation of emerging connected and automated vehicle applications. This paper discusses the development of a novel closed-loop connected vehicle analysis system (CONVAS) interlinking Vissim microscopic traffic simulation and ns-3 wireless communication simulation. In CONVAS, ns-3 uses Vissim’s vehicle positions for wireless modeling and in turn Vissim uses the packet reception from ns-3 to modify vehicle behaviors. The authors propose an application for intelligent avoidance of the dilemma zone to demonstrate the use of the platform for modeling connected and automated vehicles and to illustrate the effects of communications on the application performance. A simulation experiment was conducted with a test bed for an isolated high-speed, fixed-time signalized intersection with different communication model configurations. The evaluation results showed that the effectiveness of the application as measured by successful clearing of vehicles from the dilemma zone depended greatly on performance of wireless communication.