  Cooperating small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will open up new
application fields within next-generation Intelligent Transportation Sytems
(ITSs), e.g., airborne near field delivery. In order to allow the exploitation
of the potentials of hybrid vehicular scenarios, reliable and efficient
bidirectional communication has to be guaranteed in highly dynamic
environments. For addressing these novel challenges, we present a lightweight
framework for integrated simulation of aerial and ground-based vehicular
networks. Mobility and communication are natively brought together using a
shared codebase coupling approach, which catalyzes the development of novel
context-aware optimization methods that exploit interdependencies between both
domains. In a proof-of-concept evaluation, we analyze the exploitation of UAVs
as local aerial sensors as well as aerial base stations. In addition, we
compare the performance of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Cellular
Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) for connecting the ground- and air-based
vehicles.
