Intelligent Offloading Distribution of High Definition Street Maps for Highly Automated Vehicles

Abstract

Highly automated vehicles will change our personal mobility in the future. To ensure the safety and the comfort of their passengers, the cars have to rely on as many information regarding their current surrounding traffic situation, as they can obtain. In addition to classical sensors like cameras or radar sensors, automated vehicles use data from a so called High Definition Street Map. Through such maps, the vehicles are provided with continuous updates regarding their future driving environment on a centimeter accurate level. The required amount of data, which is necessary therefore, motivates the development of more efficient data transmission concepts. In this paper we present HD-Wmapan extension of our previous work the Dynamic Map Update Protocol. Based on each vehicle’s current context the Dynamic Map Update Protocol achieves a highly data efficient transmission of map updates compared to existing distribution approaches. HD-Wmapfurther reduces the costs of such transmissions by enabling map data to be shared via ad hoc communication between the vehicles. To evaluate the capabilities of HD-Wmapwe perform a first simulation of the morning commuting traffic within the area of Cologne, Germany. In this scenario HD-Wmapachieved an ad hoc map data off loading quota from cellular networks of up to 25.5%. These results demonstrate the gains of our approach to realize efficient map distribution via ad hoc communication, releasing load from wireless Internet access networks.