Large Object Transmission Under Safety Constraints (LOTUS)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Rolf Ernst
• Subject Area: Computer Architecture, Embedded and Massively Parallel Systems
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541889935

V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communication is currently already proposed for the support safety-critical vehicle functions such as cooperative automated driving. The communicated data objects are small and require one or few packets and therefore fit packet-oriented protocols. If one follows the known roadmaps for automated driving, safety-critical applications are expected in the future for which high data rates will be required. An example is the transport of data from high-resolution sensors (cameras, LIDAR, ...) for cross-vehicle sensor fusion and scene detection (collaborative perception, CP). Here, not only high reliability requirements apply, but also tight time constraints in order to make timely decisions in the vehicle based on the perception results. These requirements go well beyond the state of the art. Although the concept of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) offers methods that are both reliable and meet tight time constraints, the achievable data rates are far too low. One approach is to try exploiting application knowledge. Applications such as CP communicate with a stream of large data objects to which timing and quality requirements apply. In preliminary work that started in the area of Networks-on-Chip, it was shown that appropriate scheduling could use the slack between the transmission of large data objects to reconfigure the network without interruption. These results were subsequently successfully applied to TSN (real-time Ethernet), where reconfiguration was controlled by a highly reliable real-time configuration management. In recent work, we could show that the combined slack of a large data object transmission can also be used very efficiently for error correction in wireless networks, especially for the required transport of high-resolution sensor data. The thorough evaluation used simulation, formal analysis, and measurements on physical demonstrators. So far, the focus has been on a single connection and its protection. The proposed project plans to merge multiple data streams into a V2X link with error protection of the critical streams, for which scheduling and error correction mechanisms are to be extended and proven by formal reliability analysis. To include networks with centralized arbitration in access points and to enable correction of prolonged burst faults or interruptions, handover processes will be developed. They shall be based on the combination of a highly reliable redundant control layer with fast stream switching in the radio access network, based on preliminary work on safe TSN reconfiguration. Since error correction could be significantly improved by load balancing across multiple links, this approach will also be investigated. All methods shall be validated in a physical setup with measurement in a model environment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants