POWDER Uses OCUDU for Connected Vehicle Network Testing
DRIVE-SAFE Project Optimizes Mobile Handovers for Remote and Autonomous Driving
The University of Utah POWDER team is collaborating with the University of Minnesota and the University of California Riverside, as well as industry partners GM and Nokia, on a remote and cooperative autonomous driving project. The project, called DRIVE-SAFE, is part of the NSF’s Breaking Low Latency in Next-G Wireless Networks program and is developing mobility-aware 5G/NextG and C-V2X systems that cut tail latency for remote and cooperative driving, letting human teleoperators safely guide connected autonomous vehicles through complex real-world situations.
The POWDER team is focused on developing trajectory-aware handover mechanisms that use application-level information from the cellular service to eliminate unwanted handover events such as ping-pong handovers. These mechanisms reduce end-to-end application-level latency and improve application-level throughput, thus ensuring remote driving is not impeded by network artifacts.
The trajectory-aware approach is realized as xApps and rApps in an Open RAN (O-RAN) architecture that “map” application data to handover policies in the radio access network (RAN). The POWDER team is using the OCUDU Open RAN CU/DU ecosystem to implement the policy-driven RAN handover mechanisms.
The DRIVE-SAFE project is using the POWDER platform for testing and development, including extensive over-the-air (OTA) testing of OCUDU handover capabilities. POWDER will also be used for full end-to-end demonstrations of the DRIVE-SAFE system later this year.
