Spirent Communications : Highlights and Take-Aways from OmniAir Motor City Plugfest for V2X Conformance Testing

Spirent team recently participated in OmniAir Consortium's spring V2X Plugfest in Detroit, Michigan, coined the 'Motor City Plugfest'. The event was hosted by Intertek at their Plymouth, MI facility. In addition to bench testing with Intertek, field testing also took place at the American Center for Mobility's Willow Run test track.

It was great to see all the chipset, Tier2, Tier1 and OEM's participating in both bench level and vehicle level testing. During the event Spirent had 5 test benches onsite featuring our conformance test suite for validating WAVE-DSRC compliance against SAE and IEEE standards.

The Spirent test solution is based on a decade of experience developing conformance test suites for V2X applications and networks that are accepted by standards organizations such as OmniAir, Avnu, OPEN Alliance, AUTOSAR, USDOT, IEEE, or ETSI to validate the bits and bytes exchanged by a vehicle component against known standards to ensure and document strict compliance.

But why is all this conformance testing necessary? It is to ensure that every V2X module will be able to speak to other modules (potentially from different vendors) and exchange information accurately, timely and securely. This is the fundamental requirement for ensuring road safety, and in the end for enabling autonomous driving.

During the week-long event, Spirent received a lot of positive feedback from participating vendors, and it was obvious that a lot of companies worldwide are gearing up to sell this life saving WAVE-DSRC V2X technology.

While in the previous edition of the event a special focus was put on testing the IEEE1609.2 security protocol, this time SAE J2945/1 played a major role, although the other standards e.g. IEEE1609.3 and IEEE1609.4 were also thoroughly covered. To test the mobility aspects of SAE J2945/1, Spirent successfully used the advanced GSS6700 GNSS simulation system to reproduce Intertek's live test track on the test bench.

With 250 participants from more than 70 different organizations, the event was a real success and marked another milestone in the deployment of 802.11p-based V2X technology to enhance driver safety.

As a Silver sponsor at Motor City Plugfest and through its presence with OmniAir Qualified Test Equipment, Spirent is proud to have contributed to the success of this event and will continue to support the industry in making WAVE-DSRC V2X a reality, for the benefit of road traffic users worldwide.

Read how Spirent is advancing V2X certification testing to improve product quality and road safety.