D4: Dynamic, Decentralized, Distributed, Delegation-Based Network Control and Its Applications to Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Connected autonomous vehicles technology is expected to be an important component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the help of artificial intelligence, cognitive methods, software-hardware and sensor platforms, several relevant industry standards are being developed to enable connected vehicles. One significant challenge raised by connected vehicles is how the underlying communication infrastructure will be able to efficiently support them. In this article, we propose the Dynamic, Decentralized, Distributed, Delegation-based (D4) network control plane architecture, which aims at providing adequate communication support for connected vehicles. To our knowledge, D4 is the first framework to support on-demand network control decentralization. At its core, D4’s flexible network control delegation framework allows network control to be dynamically distributed on demand to address quality-of-service requirements of different connected vehicle services and applications. We demonstrate the benefits of D4 through a proof-of-concept prototype running on a fully reproducible emulation platform. Experimental results using a variety of real-world scenarios demonstrate that D4 delivers lower latency with minimal additional overhead. We also showcase the benefits of D4 when compared to traditional vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) approaches.