Smooth and Low Latency Video Streaming for Autonomous Cars during Handover

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-latency, reliable video streaming solution for autonomous vehicles, especially during handovers, ensuring timely data delivery crucial for remote driving and platooning applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel streaming approach that minimizes latency and outages during handovers in vehicular networks, validated through extensive LTE network experiments.

Findings

Ensures very low end-to-end latency in local and LTE networks.

Maintains minimal video outage during handover operations.

Effective for critical autonomous vehicle use cases like remote driving and platooning.

Abstract

Self-driving vehicles are expected to bring many benefits among which enhancing traffic efficiency and relia-bility, and reducing fuel consumption which would have a great economical and environmental impact. The success of this technology heavily relies on the full situational awareness of its surrounding entities. This is achievable only when everything is networked, including vehicles, users and infrastructure, and exchange the sensed data among the nearby objects to increase their awareness. Nevertheless, human intervention is still needed in the loop anyway to deal with unseen situations or compensate for inaccurate or improper vehicle's decisions. For such cases, video feed, in addition to other data such as LIDAR, is considered essential to provide humans with the real picture of what is hap-pening to eventually take the right decision. However, if the video is not delivered in a timely fashion,it becomes useless or likely produce catastrophic outcomes. Additionally, any disruption in the streamed video, for instance during handover operation while traversing inter-countries cross borders, is very annoying to the user and possibly ause damages as well. In this article, we start by describing two important use cases, namely Remote Driving and Platooning, where the timely delivery of video is of extreme importance [1]. Thereafter, we detail our implemented solution to accommodate the aforementioned use cases for self-driving vehicles. Through extensive experiments in local and LTE networks, we show that our solution ensures a very low end-to-end latency. Also, we show that our solution keeps the video outage as low as possible during handover operation.