Concurrent Transmission Scheduling for Perceptual Data Sharing in mmWave Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Sharing perceptual data (e.g., camera and LiDAR data) with other vehicles enhances the traffic safety of autonomous vehicles because it helps vehicles locate other vehicles and pedestrians in their blind spots. Such safety applications require high throughput and short delay, which cannot be achieved by conventional microwave vehicular communication systems. Therefore, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications are considered to be a key technology for sharing perceptual data because of their wide bandwidth. One of the challenges of data sharing in mmWave communications is broadcasting because narrow-beam directional antennas are used to obtain high gain. Because many vehicles should share their perceptual data to others within a short time frame in order to enlarge the areas that can be perceived based on shared perceptual data, an efficient scheduling for concurrent transmission that improves spatial reuse is required for perceptual data sharing. This paper proposes a data sharing algorithm that employs a graph-based concurrent transmission scheduling. The proposed algorithm realizes concurrent transmission to improve spatial reuse by designing a rule that is utilized to determine if the two pairs of transmitters and receivers interfere with each other by considering the radio propagation characteristics of narrow-beam antennas. A prioritization method that considers the geographical information in perceptual data is also designed to enlarge perceivable areas in situations where data sharing time is limited and not all data can be shared. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm doubles the area of the cooperatively perceivable region compared with a conventional algorithm that does not consider mmWave communications because the proposed algorithm achieves high-throughput transmission by improving spatial reuse. The prioritization also enlarges the perceivable region by a maximum of 20%.