[Paper Review] System-Level Simulator of LTE Sidelink C-V2X Communication for 5G

Donglin Wang, Raja Sattiraju+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Apr 10, 2019

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)4 references17 citations

TL;DR

This paper presents a 3GPP-compliant system-level simulator for LTE sidelink C-V2X communication in 5G, enabling performance evaluation of direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2X) transmission under highway scenarios. The simulator models pathloss, interference, SINR, and BLER to compute Packet Reception Ratio (PRR), demonstrating that PRR improves with lower traffic load and increased inter-vehicle distance (from 80.36% at 5m to 96.40% at 100m IVD).

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (CV2X) has been an emerging area of interest attracting both the industry and academy societies to develop, which is also a prominent emerging service for the next generation of the cellular network (5G). In the time of the development, standardization, and further improvement of 5G, so simulations are essential to test and optimize algorithms and procedures prior to their implementation process of the equipment manufactures. And CV2X communication is used for information exchange among the traffic participants with network-assisted which can reduce traffic accidents and improve traffic efficiency. Moreover, it is also the primary enabler for cooperative driving. But CV2X communication has to meet different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (e.g., ultra-high reliability (99.999%) and ultra-low latency). Guaranteeing high-level reliability is a big challenge. In order to assess system performance, accurate simulations of simple setups, as well as simulations of more complex systems via abstracted models are necessary for the CV2X communication. For checking the performance of the C-V2X communication on a highway scenario, a system-level simulator has been implemented. And, this simulation has been carried out on the network (system-level) context. Finally, the analysis and the simulation results for the C-V2X communication are presented, which shows that different objectives can be met via system-level simulation.

Motivation & Objective

• To develop a system-level simulator for LTE sidelink C-V2X communication compliant with 3GPP Release 14 standards.
• To evaluate the performance of direct V2X communication under realistic highway scenarios with network-assisted resource allocation.
• To analyze the impact of inter-vehicle distance (IVD) and traffic load on system-level performance metrics like PRR and spectral efficiency.
• To support the design and optimization of 5G C-V2X systems by providing accurate simulation of QoS requirements such as ultra-reliability and low latency.

Proposed method

• Implemented a system-level simulator for direct C-V2X communication using 3GPP Release 14 sidelink (PC5 interface) with network-assisted resource allocation (mode 3).
• Modeled pathloss using free-space pathloss and log-distance pathloss models, with parameters derived from 3GPP TR 36.843.
• Calculated received power, interference, and noise power using SINR equation: $SINR = \frac{P_{Rx}}{P_{inter} + P_{noise}}$, with thermal noise PSD at -174 dBm/Hz.
• Mapped SINR to BLER using a standard curve, setting a 1% BLER threshold to determine successful reception.
• Defined PRR as the percentage of receivers with BLER < 1%, computed across all Rxs within transmission range.
• Simulated multiple UEs with varying IVDs and traffic loads (data rates from 96 Mbps to 1920 Mbps) to assess performance under different system loads.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does inter-vehicle distance (IVD) affect the Packet Reception Ratio (PRR) in direct C-V2X communication under highway conditions?
• RQ2 What is the impact of traffic load (data rate per UE) on the PRR and spectral efficiency in sidelink C-V2X systems?
• RQ3 To what extent can system-level simulation support the evaluation of QoS requirements such as ultra-reliability (99.999%) and low latency in C-V2X?
• RQ4 How do interference and pathloss influence SINR and BLER in a dense V2X environment with multiple simultaneous transmissions?

Key findings

• PRR increased from 80.36% at 5m IVD to 96.40% at 100m IVD, indicating that lower vehicle density improves reception reliability.
• With a fixed IVD of 5m, PRR rose from 80% to 91% as traffic load decreased, demonstrating improved performance under lighter load.
• At 40m IVD and 240 Mbps data rate, PRR reached 90.83% with MCS 4.9152 b/s/Hz, showing stable performance under moderate load.
• The simulator successfully supports evaluation of QoS metrics such as reliability and latency, essential for 5G C-V2X applications.
• Lower data rates enabled the use of more robust MCS levels, improving PRR and BLER performance under high interference.
• The simulation results confirm that system-level modeling of pathloss, interference, and noise is essential for accurate C-V2X performance prediction.