Visible light and radio communication for cooperative autonomous driving

Participants : Mohammad Abualhoul, Fawzi Nashashibi.

With the extensive development of the automobile industry and the popularity of using personal road vehicles in the last decade, both traffic accidents and road congestion levels have rapidly increased. Taking advantage of advanced wireless communications to enable C-ITS can improve both road fluidity and driver comfort. Ensuring the safety requirements has been the primary interest of the standardization societies dedicated to developing C-ITS applications, in particular with the expected significant demand for a broad range of applications targeting these strict safety requirements. RF communication technology deploying IEEE 802.11p standard for vehicular applications have been dedicated to facilitating relatively medium communication range that supports high data rate for the vehicular environment, where the technology meant to operate within the road safety requirements level.

As a consequence of the accelerated increase of the wireless-based communication devices numbers for ITS applications, the RF communication solutions are pushed toward an insatiable demand for wireless networks data access and a remarkable increase in both latency and channel congestion levels. This instability introduced more usage constraints when C-ITS is required. An example of such applications where the safety requirements and usage constraints might be strictly sharp are the convoy-based ITS applications.

This research effort contributes to the autonomous vehicular communication and urban mobility improvements. The work addresses the main radio-based V2V communication limitations and challenges for ITS hard-safety applications and intends to deploy the vehicular lighting system as a supportive communication solution for convoy-based applications as an IVC (Inter Vehicle Communication)-enabled autonomous vehicle. The ultimate objectives of thisresearch was to implement, validate and integrate the VLC system within the existing C-ITS architecture by developing a VLC prototype, together with sufficient hand-over algorithms enabling VLC, RF, and perception-based solutions to ensure the maximum safety requirements and the continuous information exchange between vehicles. The feasibility and efficiency of the VLC-RF system implementation and hand-over algorithms were subjects to perform practical-based in-depth investigations of the system. In addition to the improvement in road capacity by utilizing the convoy-based autonomous driving systems.

Regulation study for interoperability tests for cooperative driving

Participants : Mohammad Abualhoul, Fawzi Nashashibi.

The technological advances of autonomous and connected road vehicles have been shown an accelerating pace in the recent years. On the other hand, the regulations for autonomous, or driverless, road vehicles across Europe still deserve much attention and discussion

V2X radio communications for road safety applications

Participants : Mohammad Abualhoul, Fawzi Nashashibi.

The development work and generating proper components to facilitate communication requirements and to be deployed in different projects scenarios is one of the main ongoing activities by all RITS team members.

There are continuous activities on both theoretical modeling and experimental evaluation of the radio channel characteristics in vehicular networks, especially the radio quality, channel congestion, load allocations, congestion, and bandwidth availability.

Based on our previous expertise and studies, we develop mechanisms for efficient and reliable V2X communications, access point selection, handover algorithms which are especially dedicated to road safety and autonomous driving applications.

Safety-critical communications in intelligent vehicular networks

Participant : Gérard Le Lann.

Intelligent vehicular networks (IVNs) are constituents of ITS. IVNs range from platoons with a lead vehicle piloted by a human driver to fully ad-hoc vehicular networks, a.k.a. VANETs, comprising autonomous/automated vehicles. Safety issues in IVNs appear to be the least studied in the ITS domain. The focus of our work is on safety-critical (SC) scenarios, where accidents and fatalities inevitably occur when such scenarios are not handled correctly. In addition to on-board robotics, inter-vehicular radio communications have been considered for achieving safety properties. Since both technologies have known intrinsic limitations (in addition to possibly experiencing temporary or permanent failures), using them redundantly is mandatory for meeting safety regulations. Redundancy is a fundamental design principle in every SC cyber-physical domain, such as, e.g., air transportation. (Optics-based inter-vehicular communications may also be part of such redundant constructs.) The focus of our on-going work is on safety-critical (SC) communications. We consider IVNs on main roads and highways, which are settings where velocities can be very high, thus exacerbating safety problems acceptable delays in the cyber space, and response times in the physical space, shall be very small. Human lives being at stake, such delays and response times must have strict (non-stochastic) upper bounds under worst-case conditions (vehicular density, concurrency and failures). Consequently, we are led to look for deterministic solutions.

Rationale

In the current ITS literature, the term safety is used without being given a precise definition. That must be corrected. In our case, a fundamental open question is: what is the exact meaning of SC communications? We have devised a definition, referred to as space-time bounds acceptability (STBA) requirements. For any given problem related to SC communications, those STBA requirements serve as yardsticks for distinguishing acceptable solutions from unacceptable ones with respect to safety. In conformance with the above, STBA requirements rest on the following worst-case upper bounds: $\lambda$ for channel access delays, and $\Delta$ for distributed inter-vehicular coordination (message dissemination, distributed agreement).

Via discussions with foreign colleagues, notably those active in the IEEE 802 Committee, we have comforted our early diagnosis regarding existing standards for V2V/V2I/V2X communications, such as IEEE 802.11p and ETSI ITS-G5: they are totally inappropriate regarding SC communications. A major flaw is the choice of CSMA/CA as the MAC-level protocol. Obviously, there cannot be such bounds as $\lambda$ and $\Delta$ with CSMA/CA. Another flaw is the choice of medium-range omnidirectional communications, radio range in the order of 250 m, and interference range in the order of 400 m. Stochastic delays achievable with existing standards are just unacceptable in moderate/worst-case contention conditions. Consider the following setting, not uncommon in many countries: a highway, 3 lanes each direction, dense traffic, i.e. 1 vehicle per 12.5 m. A simple calculation leads to the following result: any vehicle may experience (destructive) interferences from up to 384 vehicles. Even if one assumes some reasonable communications activity ratio, say 25%, one finds that up to 96 vehicles may be contending for channel access. Under such conditions, MAC-level delays and string-wide dissemination/agreement delays achieved by current standards fail to meet the STBA requirements by huge margins.

Reliance on V2I communications via terrestrial infrastructures and nodes, such as road-side units or WiFi hotspots, rather than direct V2V communications, can only lead to poorer results. First, reachability is not guaranteed: hazardous conditions may develop anywhere anytime, far away from a terrestrial node. Second, mixing SC communications and ordinary communications within terrestrial nodes is a violation of the very fundamental segregation principle: SC communications and processing shall be isolated from ordinary communications and processing. Third, security: it is very easy to jam or to spy on a terrestrial node; moreover, terrestrial nodes may be used for launching all sorts of attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks for example. Fourth, delays can only get worse than with direct V2V communications, since transiting via a node inevitably introduces additional latencies. Fifth, the delivery of every SC message must be acknowledged, which exacerbates the latency problems. Sixth, availability: what happens when a terrestrial node fails?

Trying to tweak existing standards for achieving SC communications is vain. That is also unjustified. Clearly, medium-range omnidirectional communications are unjustified for the handling of SC scenarios. By definition, accidents can only involve vehicles that are very close to each other. Therefore, short-range directional communications suffice. The obvious conclusion is that novel protocols and inter-vehicular coordination algorithms based on short-range direct V2V communications are needed. It is mandatory to check whether these novel solutions meet the STBA requirements. Future standards specifically aimed at SC communications in IVNs may emerge from such solutions.

Naming and privacy

Additionally, we are exploring the (re)naming problem as it arises in IVNs. Source and destination names appear in messages exchanged among vehicles. Most often, names are IP addresses or MAC addresses (plate numbers shall not be used for privacy reasons). A vehicle which intends to communicate with some vehicle, denoted $V$ here, must know which name name(V) to use in order to reach/designate $V$. Existing solutions are based on multicasting/broadcasting existential messages, whereby every vehicle publicizes its existence (name and geolocation), either upon request (replying to a Geocast) or spontaneously (periodic beaconing). These solutions have severe drawbacks. First, they contribute to overloading communication channels (leading to unacceptably high worst-case delays). Second, they amount to breaching privacy voluntarily. Why should vehicles reveal their existence and their time dependent geolocations, making tracing and spying much easier? Novel solutions are needed. They shall be such that: