OScar: An ETSI-Compliant C-ITS Stack for Field-Testing with Embedded Hardware Devices

Vehicular communication technologies (also known as Vehicle-to-Everything, V2X) have emerged as a solution to enable not only higher levels of automation, but also to improve the safety and environmental impact of road transportation systems. To this aim, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) has defined a set of standards detailing several message types for vehicular communications, along with a full networking stack to enable vehicles to communicate between each other and with the infrastructure. However, there is currently a critical scarcity of open stack implementations for research and testing of innovative V2X solutions in the field. To tackle this issue, this paper presents OScar, an open-source, ETSI-compliant C-ITS stack for embedded hardware devices aimed at vehicular field tests. Addressing the lack of affordable, customizable software for V2X communications, OScar proposes a lightweight, self-contained, Linux-based solution, designed to run even in low-end hardware. OScar has been validated in the field thanks to a series of preliminary tests involving Cooperative Awareness Messages disseminated through IEEE 802.11p.