Cyber-Physical Scheduling for Predictable Reliability of Inter-Vehicle Communications

Predictable reliability of inter-vehicle communications is a basis for the paradigm shift from single-vehicle-oriented safety and efficiency control to networked vehicle control. The lack of predictable interference control in existing vehicular communication mechanisms, however, makes them incapable of ensuring predictable communication reliability. To address the gap, we propose the Cyber-Physical Scheduling (CPS) framework that leverages the PRK interference model and addresses the challenges of vehicle mobility and broadcast to PRK-based scheduling. To address vehicle mobility, CPS leverages the physical locations of vehicles to define the gPRK interference model, a geometric approximation of the PRK model, for lightweight control signaling and effective interference relation estimation, and CPS leverages cyber-physical structures of vehicle traffic flows for effective instantiation and use of the gPRK model. To support predictable broadcast, CPS controls the interactions between gPRK model adaptations of the links of the same sender to ensure predictable broadcast reliability in the presence of vehiclemobility. Through experimental analysis with high-fidelity ns-3 and SUMO simulation, we observe that CPS enables predictable reliability while achieving high throughput and low delay in communication. To the best of our knowledge, CPS is the first field-deployable method that ensures predictable interference control and thus reliability in inter-vehicle communications.