From Lab to Testbed: Benchmarking 5G/6G V2X Architectures for Connected and Automated Mobility

Vehicular communication has moved from a research concept to a deployment challenge. V2X protocols now run over WiFi and 5G networks, and ongoing 6G research is already defining what follows: sub-millisecond control loops, sensor data shared between vehicles, and computation pushed to the roadside. Most published evaluations of these architectures still come from simulation or minor laboratory tests, due to limitations for creating representative scenarios with sufficient critical mass. Coupled tools with simulators such as NS3/4 or OMNeT++, together with traffic generators like SUMO, model radio behaviour and dense traffic together, and they have become the de facto approach to test protocols and architectures before reaching real implementations or field tests. Software-defined radios, commercial off-the-shelf modules and instrumented vehicles routinely produce latency, reliability and handover figures that a simulated highway or city scenario fails to predict accurately. The field lacks a common framework for determining how much confidence can be placed in simulated results and limited laboratory tests, making findings across research groups hard to compare and harder to reuse.This Research Topic sets out to close the gap between simulated, in-lab and real deployments in vehicular networks, and to provide the community with benchmarks it can reuse. We invite work that progresses on realistic simulation, laboratory emulation and/or field tests in V2X architectures for CCAM. Contributions that explain simulation-experimentation divergences are as valuable as contributions that avoid them: a channel model that breaks down at high vehicle density, a scheduler that behaves differently on commercial hardware, an edge deployment whose latency budget holds in simulation and not on the road, etc. We also welcome the material that makes such comparisons possible, including open datasets, published scenario definitions, calibration procedures, simulation platform, or V2X testbeds, among others. Taken together, the collection should give researchers, testbed operators and standards contributors a common reference for what a V2X performance claim means and what evidence should sit behind it.We welcome contributions on: 5G and 6G vehicular network architectures; V2X protocol design and evaluation; WiFi-based vehicular networks (802.11x); multi-access edge computing for safety-critical automotive applications; cooperative perception and sensor sharing; machine learning for resource allocation, congestion prediction or network security in connected vehicles; coupled network and mobility simulation; testbed design, instrumentation and field measurement campaigns; simulation calibration and validation against measured data; reproducibility, open datasets and benchmark scenarios. Both experimental and methodological work are in scope, as are negative results where the method is sound. Article types: Original Research, Methods, Data Report, Brief Research Report, Systematic Review, Review, Perspective, and Opinion. Topic editors: Jose Santa, Esteban Egea-Lopez, Ramon Sanchez-Iborra, Manabu Tsukada, Zhi Liu, Juan Carlos Aguado Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86530/from-lab-to-testbed-benchmarking-5g6g-v2x-architectures-for-connected-and-automated-mobility