T16 – V2X on the Road: Technologies, Channel Access Mechanisms, and Experimental Evaluation

Co-presenter: Marco Rapelli, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Co-presenter: Vittorio Todisco, Università di Bologna, Italy

Abstract: Over the past decade, multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs), including IEEE 802.11p/802.11bd and Cellular-V2X (LTE-V2X and 5G NR-V2X), have been developed and progressively introduced into real-world deployments, contributing to a rapidly evolving and increasingly heterogeneous ecosystem.

This tutorial provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies, focusing on key enabling paradigms, system design principles, and their evolution toward future 6G systems.

It presents a structured analysis of these technologies from both a technical and system-level perspective, highlighting their operational principles, performance characteristics, and deployment considerations. Particular attention is given to distributed resource management mechanisms, such as NR-V2X Mode 2 sidelink operations, as well as contention-based channel access in IEEE 802.11-based systems.

Beyond the technical aspects, the tutorial discusses the current status of V2X deployment from an industrial and regulatory perspective. It reviews the role of standardization bodies (e.g., 3GPP and ETSI), ongoing policy and spectrum allocation decisions, and their impact on technology adoption and ecosystem evolution.

Finally, the tutorial presents simulation, emulation, and experimental platforms for vehicular scenarios. By integrating simulation frameworks, digital twin approaches, and real-world testbeds, it enables reproducible, end-to-end experimental pipelines, supporting both research and industrial deployment of next-generation connected mobility systems.

Co-presenter’s Bios:

Marco Rapelli:

Marco Rapelli received his B.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering (2015) and his M.Sc. in Computer and Communication Networks Engineering (2017) both at Politecnico di Torino. He took part of FULL (Future Urban Legacy Lab), an inter-disciplinary center of Politecnico di Torino, where, in March 2021, he received his Ph.D. cum laude in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. During his Ph.D., he also spent a eight-month visiting period at the Computer and Communication Systems Labs at Technische Universität Berlin, in Berlin, Germany. He is now an Assistant Professor with time contract at Computer and Communication Network Department (DAUIN) of Politecnico di Torino. His main research interests focus on mobility studies, large-scale urban traffic simulators and vehicular networks.

Marco held several tutorials and workshops in the past, as hereafter detailed.

● The “Open Network Intelligence for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (ONI-CAV) Workshop”, RESTART plenary session, Catania, Italy.
● The “Dataset, Resources, and Innovative tools for Vehicular networks (DRIVE) Workshop”, IEEE VTC-Spring 2025, Oslo, Norway.
● The “Digital twins, Resources, and Innovative tools for Vehicular networks (DRIVE) Tutorial”, IEEE VTC-Fall 2025, Chengdu, China.
● The “Digital twins and Real-world Integration for Vehicular-Aerial Intelligent Research and experimentation (DRIVE-AIR) Tutorial”, accepted for IEEE VTC-Spring 2026, Nice, France.

Vittorio Todisco:

Vittorio Todisco is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi” at the University of Bologna, Italy. He recently obtained his PhD in 2025 in Automotive Engineering for Intelligent Mobility from the University of Bologna. His research primarily focuses on wireless systems and networks, particularly in the area of connected vehicles and vehicular communication systems. He is one of the maintainers of WiLabV2Xsim, one of the few available open-source simulators for direct Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. Vittorio actively contributes to national and international projects related to intelligent transportation systems and is involved in the study of standards for vehicular communications. Additionally, he serves as a teaching tutor for the Laboratory of Wireless Communications course at UNIBO.