Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

Vinod Kulathumani

Committee Member

Andrew Nix

Committee Member

Matthew C Valenti

Committee Member

Kakan Dey

Committee Member

Yanfang Ye

Abstract

The automotive industry has changed more in the last one decade than ever before. Rapid advancements in autonomous driving have opened up opportunities for CAVs (Connected and Automated Vehicles). Vehicles today rely on a sensor-suite to map the surrounding and use that information for safety and navigation. The sensor's view is limited to its line of sight and this drawback can be tapered off by using Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I), generally referred to as Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communication. In this thesis, we specifically focus on utilizing V2V communication using on-board Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) radios for exchanging vehicular information. Unlike V2I, this mode does not rely on the existence of densely deployed communication infrastructure but nevertheless can utilize those when available.

A significant amount of existing research in V2V using DSRC radios has focused on a single hop broadcast mode, i.e., utilize information that is within direct communication range of each other. While this is useful for safety applications like collision warnings/avoidance and lane change warnings, there are applications that benefit from transmitting information beyond a single hop communication range. For instance, V2V information can be used for optimizing vehicle routes, improving fuel efficiency and highway merging to name a few. However, transmitting information over such long distances need multi-hop communication protocols, which are challenging to design because now the available channel bandwidth is shared between single hop source transmission and forwarding of messages from multi-hop. As vehicular density increases, and information is disseminated over long distances, the available bandwidth for disseminating single hop messages diminishes thereby reducing the precision of information about nearby vehicles.

To address this problem, this dissertation presents RoAdNet, a multi-hop, multi-resolution protocol that draws inspiration from distance sensitive multi-hop forwarding techniques to better utilize the bandwidth and successfully send information over long distances. RoAdNet trades off information precision with distance and is thereby able to deliver information over larger distances without affecting the precision of single hop information. The protocol is evaluated using a simulation framework that emulates realistic traffic conditions. The quality of the disseminated data is evaluated as a function of distance under different traffic and communication network parameters. RoAdNet is hardware platform agnostic and seamlessly interfaces into any underlying radio technology.

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