CRII: NeTS: Towards Joint Mobile Broadband and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

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Cellular vehicle-to-everything communication (C-V2X) is a promising solution to reduce road incidents and traffic in future smart cities by communicating critical safety and road information with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To guarantee safe and efficient operation of CAVs, emerging cellular networks must support services with ultra-reliability and low-latency requirements (e.g., emergency braking) together with mobile broadband applications that need very high data rates (e.g., high-definition maps). Meeting such stringent requirements for large number of CAVs is beyond the capacity of existing networks that operate at scarce sub-6 gigahertz frequencies. Furthermore, while high-frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offer large bandwidth, mmWave communications pose new challenges in terms of reliability that stem from inherent propagation characteristics of mmWave signals. To address these challenges, the goal of this research is to develop a holistic framework that enables seamless multiplexing of heterogeneous C-V2X traffic over aggregated mmWave and sub-6 GHz frequencies, while taking into account unique limitations and complementary features of communications at each frequency band. This research is accompanied by a comprehensive educational plan that includes mentoring graduate and undergraduate students to participate in research and testbed development, as well as various outreach events for underserved students at local schools.This fundamental research enables inter-frequency range carrier aggregation to manage the heterogeneous vehicle-to-everything communication (C-V2X) traffic jointly over mmWave and sub-6 GHz bands and to optimize mobility management for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), while addressing key challenges of mmWave links such as reliability and sparsity. Given the ongoing efforts by standardization groups are primarily focused on carrier aggregation over a single frequency range, new schemes for modeling, optimization, and performance analysis of C-V2X communications are required that account for fundamental differences between mmWave and sub-6 GHz communications. To this end, this framework brings forward novel solutions at the intersections of wireless networking, edge computing, graph theory, and reliability theory, to achieve the following key innovations: 1) Designing new flexible frame structures to dynamically manage the heterogeneous C-V2X traffic over the aggregated mmWave and sub-6 GHz frequency ranges; 2) Analyzing the end-to-end performance of the proposed multi-band radio access network (RAN) with advanced features such as RAN function splitting and edge computing capabilities; 3) Optimizing the mobility management for CAVs based on the derived end-to-end performance metrics; and 4) Developing a comprehensive simulation testbed to evaluate the proposed schemes. The anticipated results of the proposed research will advance C-V2X networks and expedite the deployment of CAVs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.