Implementation of standard-compliant ETSI ITS-G5 Networking and Transport Layers on ns-3

The future transportation systems are expected to be revolutionized by connected and fully automated vehicles, significantly improving road safety and traffic efficiency, together with the overall user experience. These vehicular applications come at a high deployment cost and with a complexity that makes it necessary to be extensively tested and analyzed with simulation tools. This thesis puts its basis on an open-source vehicular network simulation framework built on the ns-3 simulator and making use of SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) to manage the mobility. This framework, called MS-VAN3T, enables the creation of vehicular scenarios and models all the aspects of the communication among the various entities in the created scenarios. One of the key features of this framework that sets it apart from others is that it integrates multiple communication stacks under a single open-source repository. In this framework the message exchange is based on standardized ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) messages, defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for the Facilities layer, more specifically CAM (Cooperative Awareness Message) and DENM (Decentralized Environmental Notification Message). The idea behind this work is to implement and test other parts of the ETSI protocol stack, focusing, in particular, on the ITS Transport and Networking layer. The two main protocols defined by ETSI for this layer are BTP (Basic Transport Protocol) and GeoNetworking. These protocols are designed to support a variety of heterogeneous application requirements and to provide communication in mobile environments without the need for a coordinating infrastructure, therefore, enabling Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) as well as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The goal of this work is to further develop the MS-VAN3T simulation framework to investigate how these two protocols interact with the aforementioned Facilities layer and the different access layers supported by MS-VAN3T. This work thus increases and enhances the already powerful functionalities available in this framework. With particular attention to the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.11p model present in MS-VAN3T, an analysis is made on how it is possible to simulate both V2V and V2I applications in an environment that does not make use of the traditional transport and network layers (UDP or TCP over IP), but rather adopts the ETSI's BTP and GeoNetworking protocols to deliver packets among the nodes. These packets, sent in a simulation environment, can be easily dissected with a packet analyzer, such as Wireshark, so to extract meaningful information on the simulated network. Although not all the features requested by ETSI are present in this work so far, the core functionalities for network management and packet handling necessary to fully support the Facilities layer services present in MS-VAN3T, have been implemented. Towards the conclusion of this thesis, an analysis of the obtained results will be followed by a mention of the possible future work and improvements. Lastly, we are going to see how we can make use of MS-VAN3T not only as a simulation tool but also as an emulator, being able to send packets into the real world with a physical interface.