An Open Software-Defined-Radio Platform for LTE-V2X and beyond

Direct communication between vehicles using the sidelink is becoming increasingly important, but there is a lack of opportunities for performance evaluation, testing of new features and measurement data acquisition. In this paper, we present an open source implementation of the 3GPP C-V2X sidelink Mode 4. The implementation is standard-compliant and provides additional measurement and configuration interfaces that enable its use as an evaluation and measurement platform. We integrate our implementation in a software defined radio (SDR) based hardware platform that allows for practical outdoor use at different frequencies. In addition, we verify the performance of the SDR-based sidelink setup using a hardware channel emulator, and we compare the packet error rate performance against available performance curves in literature. Finally, we show the benefits of our platform over simulations by using the realistic SDR-based setup to generate exemplary reference curves for different 3GPP channels.