Standards-Compliant Multi-Protocol On-Board Unit for the Evaluation of Connected and Automated Mobility Services in Multi-Vendor Environments

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications enable real-time information exchange between vehicles and infrastructure, which extends the perception range of vehicles beyond the limits of on-board sensors and, thus, facilitating the realisation of cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) services that will improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In the context of CCAM, the successful deployments of cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) use cases, with the integration of advanced wireless communication technologies, are effectively leading to make transport safer and more efficient. However, the evaluation of multi-vendor and multi-protocol based CCAM service architectures can become challenging and complex. Additionally, conducting on-demand field trials of such architectures with real vehicles involved is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In order to overcome these obstacles, in this paper, we present the development of a standards-compliant experimental vehicular on-board unit (OBU) that supports the integration of multiple V2X protocols from different vendors to communicate with heterogeneous cloud-based services that are offered by several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We experimentally demonstrate the functionalities of the OBU in a real-world deployment of a cooperative collision avoidance service infrastructure that is based on edge and cloud servers. In addition, we measure end-to-end application-level latencies of multi-protocol supported V2X information flows to show the effectiveness of interoperability in V2X communications between different vehicle OEMs.