Simulated versus Field Test LTE V2X Per Performance in Congested Highway Vehicular Scenarios

The increasing number of traffic fatalities motivates adoption of vehicular communication technologies. Long Term Evolution (LTE) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology automatically exchanges information among and between vehicles and infrastructure to enable safe and efficient transportation services. To understand the performance of LTE V2X technology, the U.S. Department of Transportation conducted field tests in 2021 and 2022. A simulation tool was developed to provide a more cost-effective solution for assessing LTE V2X performance in a diverse range of scenarios and LTE V2X configurations. In this study, the packet error rate (PER) results found in field tests were compared with those produced in simulations for three different test types: static devices (SDs) with fixed transmit time interval (TTI) of 100 ms, SDs with fixed TTI of 600 ms, and SDs with congestion control (CC) ON. It was found that although simulation results sometimes fall outside the confidence bars on the 100 ms TTI case, they stayed within the 95% confidence intervals of the field test on the 600 ms TTI and CC cases. Thus, the simulation demonstrated results that were in line with the field trial measurements. Simulation results were also extended to compare cases with 1,500 devices with CC ON and 252 devices with 100 ms TTI.