With the proliferation of ADAS and autonomous systems, the quality and quantity of the data to be used by vehicles has become crucial. In-vehicle sensors are evolving, but their usability is limited to their field of view and detection distance. V2X communication systems solve these issues by creating a cooperative perception domain amongst road users and the infrastructure by communicating accurate, real-time information.
In this paper, we propose a novel Consolidated Object Data Service (CODS) for multi-Radio Access Technology (RAT) V2X communication. This service collects information using BSM packets from the vehicular network and perception information from infrastructure-based sensors. The service then fuses the collected data, offering the communication participants with a consolidated, deduplicated, and accurate object database. Since fusing the objects is resource intensive, this service can save in-vehicle computation costs. The combination of diverse input sources improves the object detection accuracy, which can benefit the vehicle's ADAS or autonomous driving functions.
A testbed was developed to evaluate the performance of the system under three network architectures – local RSU, Edge and the Cloud. The CODS resided in virtual machines in the corresponding three locations. The OBUs and RSU used had multi-RAT (C-V2X PC5 and 5G Uu) connectivity. A connected thermal camera was used as the infrastructure sensor in our setup.
The paper presents the performance evaluation of various CODS realizations, deployment details of the testbed on a live network and introduces our promising experimental results, explaining the trade-offs of the different deployment schemes and their effects on system fidelity and communication characteristics.