Simulation of Tele-Operated Driving over 5G Using CARLA and OMNeT++

Tele-Operated Driving (ToD) allows a remote operator to drive a vehicle through the services provided by a mobile radio network. ToD can replace on-board driving in many different occasions, such as dangerous environments, but can also provide assistance to autonomous driving systems in difficult and unexpected situations. ToD is a bandwidth-demanding and latency-sensitive service, which requires transmitting a large amount of sensor data from vehicle to operator, and driving instructions from operator to vehicle. The data exchange must comply with strict real-time requirements. The low latency and high bandwidth offered by 5G Radio Access Networks (RANs) open new opportunities for an effective deployment of ToD services in different contexts. However, the rapidly changing channel quality and network conditions can raise many challenges in meeting bandwidth and latency requirements. In this paper, we report on the development of an elaborate simulation framework combining the realism of vehicle dynamics simulated by CARLA and the detailed network models provided by OMNeT++. We demonstrate the capabilities of the simulation framework by describing results about the feasibility of ToD services in a simple scenario under different network and application configurations. We simulate the implementation of the ToD service in a slice of a 5G RAN, with varying application and network parameters, also considering a variable amount of background traffic. Our simulation results show that the ToD service performance is heavily impacted by the amount and shape (i.e., the selected 5G NR numerology) of radio resources allocated to the 5G slice.