Qosmotec and Azimuth collaborate on real-world Car-2-Car testing
Qosmotec’s project team for the integration of Azimuth’s channel emulator led by Iris-Marie Köster (left) with students from the University of Applied Science Aachen.
Qosmotec and Azimuth Systems, Inc., a leading provider of automated, realworld mobile performance test solutions, announced a joint collaboration for developing a Car-to-Car (C2C) test solution. By combining Qosmotec’s signal strength emulator QPER with Azimuth’s ACE MX channel emulator, the solution simulates all traffic, mobility and channel aspects of a C2C environment. This solution enables realistic, and comprehensive C2C interoperability testing in the lab.
Testing Car-to-Car communication in the lab requires the emulation of a significant number of radio links (each of which maps to a link between two cars), some links requiring primarily just attenuation and others requiring a complete radio channel. Qosmotec’s field strength emulator system provides the attenuation links for these tests; the field strength emulator offers a large number of configurable links that can be configured to reflect the different path loss between the cars. Azimuth’s ACE MX channel emulator complements this by emulating the complete radio channel (path loss, Doppler, propagation delay, AWGN etc.) for links that require a complete radio channel. The QPER-C2X software controls this integrated solution and provides a graphical interface to create and configure the physical environment and the traffic model.
The ACE MX is a part of Azimuth’s industry leading portfolio of channel and environment emulators purpose-built for testing real-world device-network interactions and their impact on end-user performance. The underlying platform is architected to support existing and forward-looking technologies and enable rapid development and automation of applications and solutions such as C2C communications.
Qosmotec’s QPER-C2X is a signal strength emulator enabling to interconnect up to 15 radio modules and thus simulating a high number of individual radio as they are established in Ad-Hoc networks. It emulates all kind of signal strength effects like path loss, shadowing, fast fading or antenna shaping on each individual path. These effects are automatically generated, when the tester runs a traffic model that can simply be created on a graphical user interface. Besides to that, QPER-C2X offers an open interface to integrate with traffic modeling tools that are well established in the automotive industry like the open source software SUMO.
Pete Paglia, President of Azimuth Systems, said, “Azimuth is excited by our leadership in channel emulation and its application in emerging areas such as C2C. Azimuth has a strong track record of developing innovative solutions for emerging applications and we see C2C as an area where we can contribute to this evolving industry by leveraging our leadership in channel and environment emulation along with our solutions expertise. We look forward to building on the strong collaboration that already exists between Qosmotec and Azimuth. Together we can provide end-to-end real world test solutions that help our mutual customers better emulate the environment and test C2C more comprehensively.”
Mark Hakim, Managing Director at Qosmotec, said: “Now, where Car-2-Car technology is on the step between research activities and rollout on the streets, systems for interoperability testing become indispensible. Nobody wants to risk mounting a technology in cars that has not been examined under absolutely real-life conditions. Our joint solution with Azimuth enables us to offer a best fitting solution for emulating air interface conditions on a test bench. This will accelerate the deployment of Car-2-Car communication.”
On Qosmotec side, a team of five Bachelor students from the University of Applied Science has been working on the development of traffic scenarios, that are dynamically executed on the Azimuth ACE MX channel emulator. Iris-Marie Köster, head of the team, was excited about the achieved results: “It feels fantastic to put scientific knowledge into pratice this way.” From next week on, Iris will operate the developed prototype on the ITS plugtest in Helmond.
