Tentacles: A Middleware with Multi-Network Communication Reliability for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Autonomous Driving

Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Autonomous Driving (CAD) is a new paradigm of autonomous driving, which relies on the cooperation between intelligent roads and autonomous vehicles. This paradigm has been shown to be safer and more efficient compared to the on-vehicle-only autonomous driving paradigm. Our real-world deployment data indicate that the effectiveness of Vehicle-Infrastructure CAD is constrained by the reliability and performance of commercial communication networks. This paper targets this exact problem and proposes Tentacles, a middleware to achieve high communication reliability between intelligent roads and autonomous vehicles, in the context of Vehicle-Infrastructure CAD. Specifically, Tentacles dynamically matches Vehicle-Infrastructure CAD applications and the underlying communication technologies based on varying communication performance and quality needs. Evaluation results confirm that Tentacles reduces deadline violations by more than 88%, significantly improving the reliability of Vehicle-Infrastructure CAD systems.