Due to the highly congested frequency spectrum at sub-6G used by existing cellular systems, it is foreseen mmWave spectrum will be needed to provide the high data rate needed, which has been set as an active V2V activity for the 3GPP Release 17. mmWave refers to radio frequency spectrum between 24 GHz and 100 GHz, which is already a major part of 5G new radio (NR). With its significantly wider bandwidth and high spatial multiplexing gains, multi-Gigabit and low-latency connectivity could be available. Extensive research has been done for infrastructure based 5G mmWave communication, such as channel modelling and massive MIMO beamforming. As mmWave suffers from excessive propagation loss and susceptibility to blockage by obstacles such as vehicles and buildings, it necessitates the use of directional beamforming and precludes broadcast. The directional connectivity makes V2V operation with mmWave very challenging, including link configuration and beam management, contention based channel access, sidelink autonomous scheduling, distributed congestion control and interference management at MAC layer. This project will move beyond the SOTA by providing robust and innovative solution with mmWave and non-orthogonal multiple access, which will exploit context from AV cooperative perception.
On the other hand, the reliability of the object detection and tracking is critical for data fusion and cooperative perception, but there is lack of investigation in the existing research from the DL models and data fusion aspects. Furthermore, accurate evaluation and modeling of the V2V, cooperative perception and CAV applications are essential steps for protocol design and performance characterization. While there are increasing efforts on evaluating CAV over real testbeds, the existing works are limited in the scale of performance evaluation and depth of understanding the potential system issues. There is no reported evaluation of advanced CAV applications over 5G V2V. This project will move beyond the SOTA by developing novel reliable cooperative perception solutions with new DL models for object detection and data fusion, and novel integrated simulation of CV and AV safety applications
