arXiv subjects

Yaser P. Fallah

Publications and source records attributed to Yaser P. Fallah.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Impact of Communication Loss on MPC based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control and Platooning

Cooperative driving, enabled by communication between automated vehicle systems, is expected to significantly contribute to transportation safety and efficiency. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) and platooning are two of the main cooperative driving applications that are currently under study. These applications offer significant improvements over current advanced driver assistant systems such as adaptive cruise control (ACC). The primary motivation of CACC and Platooning is to reduce traffic congestion and improve traffic flow, traffic throughput, and highway capacity. These applications need an efficient controller to consider the computational cost and ensure driving comfort and high responsiveness. The advantage of Model Predictive Control is that we can realize high control performance since all constrain for these applications can be explicitly dealt with through solving an optimization problem. These applications highly depend on information update and Communication reliability for their safety and stability purposes. In this paper, we propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based approach for CACC and platooning, and examine the impact of communication loss on the performance and robustness of the control scheme. The results show an improvement in response time and string stability, demonstrating the potential of cooperation to attenuate disturbances and improve traffic flow.

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arXiv2021

RVE-CV2X: A Scalable Emulation Framework for Real-Time Evaluation of CV2X-Based Connected Vehicle Applications

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has become an integral component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) due to its ability to connect vehicles, pedestrians, infrastructure, and create situational awareness among vehicles. Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X), based on 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 14, is one such communication technology that has recently gained significant attention to cater the needs of V2X communication. However, for a successful deployment of C-V2X, it is of paramount significance to thoroughly test the performance of this technology. It is unfeasible to physically conduct a V2X communication experiment to test the performance of C-V2X by arranging hundreds of real vehicles and their transceiving on-board units. Although multiple simulators based on frameworks such as NS-3, OMNET++ and OPNET have proven to be reliable and economic alternatives to using real vehicles, all these simulators are time-consuming and require several orders of magnitudes longer than the actual simulation time. As opposed to physical field- and simulation-based testing, network emulators can provide more realistic and repeatable results for testing vehicular communication. This paper proposes a real-time, high-fidelity, hardware-in-the-loop network emulator (RVE-CV2X) based on C-V2X mode 4 that can provide scalable, reliable and repeatable testing scenarios for V2X communication. The accuracy of this emulator is verified by comparing it to an already validated C-V2X simulator based on the NS-3 framework.

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arXiv2020

Feature Sharing and Integration for Cooperative Cognition and Perception with Volumetric Sensors

The recent advancement in computational and communication systems has led to the introduction of high-performing neural networks and high-speed wireless vehicular communication networks. As a result, new technologies such as cooperative perception and cognition have emerged, addressing the inherent limitations of sensory devices by providing solutions for the detection of partially occluded targets and expanding the sensing range. However, designing a reliable cooperative cognition or perception system requires addressing the challenges caused by limited network resources and discrepancies between the data shared by different sources. In this paper, we examine the requirements, limitations, and performance of different cooperative perception techniques, and present an in-depth analysis of the notion of Deep Feature Sharing (DFS). We explore different cooperative object detection designs and evaluate their performance in terms of average precision. We use the Volony dataset for our experimental study. The results confirm that the DFS methods are significantly less sensitive to the localization error caused by GPS noise. Furthermore, the results attest that detection gain of DFS methods caused by adding more cooperative participants in the scenes is comparable to raw information sharing technique while DFS enables flexibility in design toward satisfying communication requirements.

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arXiv2020

Bandwidth-Adaptive Feature Sharing for Cooperative LIDAR Object Detection

Situational awareness as a necessity in the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) domain is the subject of a significant number of researches in recent years. The driver's safety is directly dependent on the robustness, reliability, and scalability of such systems. Cooperative mechanisms have provided a solution to improve situational awareness by utilizing high speed wireless vehicular networks. These mechanisms mitigate problems such as occlusion and sensor range limitation. However, the network capacity is a factor determining the maximum amount of information being shared among cooperative entities. The notion of feature sharing, proposed in our previous work, aims to address these challenges by maintaining a balance between computation and communication load. In this work, we propose a mechanism to add flexibility in adapting to communication channel capacity and a novel decentralized shared data alignment method to further improve cooperative object detection performance. The performance of the proposed framework is verified through experiments on Volony dataset. The results confirm that our proposed framework outperforms our previous cooperative object detection method (FS-COD) in terms of average precision.

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arXiv2020

A Maneuver-based Urban Driving Dataset and Model for Cooperative Vehicle Applications

Short-term future of automated driving can be imagined as a hybrid scenario in which both automated and human-driven vehicles co-exist in the same environment. In order to address the needs of such road configuration, many technology solutions such as vehicular communication and predictive control for automated vehicles have been introduced in the literature. Both aforementioned solutions rely on driving data of the human driver. In this work, we investigate the currently available driving datasets and introduce a real-world maneuver-based driving dataset that is collected during our urban driving data collection campaign. We also provide a model that embeds the patterns in maneuver-specific samples. Such model can be employed for classification and prediction purposes.

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arXiv2020

A Prospect Theoretic Approach for Trust Management in IoT Networks under Manipulation Attacks

As Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical systems become more ubiquitous and an integral part of our daily lives, it is important that we are able to trust the data aggregate from such systems. However, the interpretation of trustworthiness is contextual and varies according to the risk tolerance attitude of the concerned application and varying levels of uncertainty associated with the evidence upon which trust models act. Hence, the data integrity scoring mechanisms should have provisions to adapt to varying risk attitudes and uncertainties. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian inference model and a prospect theoretic framework for data integrity scoring that quantify the trustworthiness of data collected from IoT devices in the presence of an adversaries who manipulate the data. We consider an imperfect anomaly monitoring mechanism that monitors the data being sent from each device and classifies the outcome as not compromised, compromised, and cannot be inferred. These outcomes are conceptualized as a multinomial hypothesis of a Bayesian inference model with three parameters which are then used for calculating a utility value on how reliable the aggregate data is. We use a prospect theory inspired approach to quantify this data integrity score and evaluate the trustworthiness of the aggregate data from the IoT framework. Furthermore, we also model the system using the traditionally used expected utility theory and compare the results with that obtained using prospect theory. As decisions are based on how the data is fused, we propose two measuring models: one optimistic and another conservative. The proposed framework is validated using extensive simulation experiments. We show how data integrity scores vary under a variety of system factors like attack intensity and inaccurate detection.

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arXiv2020

Representing Realistic Human Driver Behaviors using a Finite Size Gaussian Process Kernel Bank

The performance of cooperative vehicular applications is tightly dependent on the reliability of the underneath Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technology. V2X standards, such as Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and Cellular-V2X (C-V2X), which are passing their research phase before being mandated in the US, are supposed to serve as reliable circulatory systems for the time-critical information in vehicular networks; however, they are still heavily suffering from scalability issues in real traffic scenarios. The technology-agnostic notion of Model-Based Communications (MBC) has been proposed in our previous works as a promising paradigm to address the scalability issue and its performance, while acquiring different modeling strategies, has been vastly studied. In this work, the modeling capabilities of a powerful non-parametric Bayesian inference scheme, i.e., Gaussian Processes (GPs), is investigated within the MBC context with more details. Our observations reveal an important potential strength of GP-based MBC scheme, i.e., its capability of accurately modeling different driving behavioral patterns by utilizing only a limited size GP kernel bank. This interesting aspect of integrating GP inference with MBC framework, which has been verified in this work using realistic driving data sets, introduces this architecture as a strong and appealing candidate to address the scalability challenge. The results confirm that our proposed approach over-performs the state of the art research in terms of the required communication rate and GP kernel bank size.

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arXiv2020

Cooperative LIDAR Object Detection via Feature Sharing in Deep Networks

The recent advancements in communication and computational systems has led to significant improvement of situational awareness in connected and autonomous vehicles. Computationally efficient neural networks and high speed wireless vehicular networks have been some of the main contributors to this improvement. However, scalability and reliability issues caused by inherent limitations of sensory and communication systems are still challenging problems. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the effects of these limitations by introducing the concept of feature sharing for cooperative object detection (FS-COD). In our proposed approach, a better understanding of the environment is achieved by sharing partially processed data between cooperative vehicles while maintaining a balance between computation and communication load. This approach is different from current methods of map sharing, or sharing of raw data which are not scalable. The performance of the proposed approach is verified through experiments on Volony dataset. It is shown that the proposed approach has significant performance superiority over the conventional single-vehicle object detection approaches.

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arXiv2019

Spatio-temporal Dynamics of Cellular V2X Communication in Dense Vehicular Networks

Cellular Vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication is a major V2X solution proposed and developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Our previous work has studied scalability aspects of C-V2X and demonstrated its potential for accommodating large numbers of vehicles in dense vehicular scenarios. However, existing studies in the scientific literature mostly have a network-level approach to the problem and do not assess the temporal and spatial dynamics of C-V2X networks in heavy network load situations. In this work we shed light on the spatio-temporal characteristics of these networks and investigate the effectiveness of the congestion control algorithm in dense vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) in terms of settling time, stability, and reliability to be employed for the purpose of safety-critical vehicular applications, where latency plays a major role.

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arXiv2019

Analysis of Distributed Congestion Control in Cellular Vehicle-to-everything Networks

Cellular Vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication has been proposed in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project release 14 standard to address the latency and reliability requirements of cooperative safety applications. Such applications can involve highly congested vehicular scenarios where the network experiences high data loads. Thus, a sophisticated congestion control solution is vital in order to maintain the network performance required for safety-related applications. With the aid of our high-fidelity link-level network simulator, we investigate the feasibility of implementing the distributed congestion control algorithm specified in SAE J2945/1 standard on top of the C-V2X stack. We describe our implementation and evaluate the performance of transmission rate and range control mechanisms using relevant metrics. Additionally, we identify areas for potential design enhancements and further investigation.

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arXiv2019

Real-Time Hardware-In-the-Loop Emulation Framework for DSRC-based Connected Vehicle Applications

The rapid growth of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) solutions have made a significant impact on the safety of intelligent transportation systems. However, similar to any other emerging technology, thorough testing and evaluation studies are of paramount importance for the effectiveness of these solutions. Due to the safety-critical nature of this problem, large-scale real-world field tests do not seem to be a feasible and practical option. Thus, employing simulation and emulation approaches are preferred in the development phase of the safety-related applications in CAVs. Such methodologies not only mitigate the high cost of deploying large number of real vehicles, but also enable researchers to exhaustively perform repeatable tests in various scenarios. Software simulation of very large-scale vehicular scenarios is mostly a time consuming task and as a matter of fact, any simulation environment would include abstractions in order to model the real-world system. In contrast to the simulation-based solutions, network emulators are able to produce more realistic test environments. In this work, we propose a high-fidelity hardware-in-the-loop network emulator framework in order to create testing environments for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. The proposed architecture is able to run in real-time fashion in contrast to other existing systems, which can potentially boost the development and validation of V2V systems.

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arXiv2019

Controlling Steering Angle for Cooperative Self-driving Vehicles utilizing CNN and LSTM-based Deep Networks

A fundamental challenge in autonomous vehicles is adjusting the steering angle at different road conditions. Recent state-of-the-art solutions addressing this challenge include deep learning techniques as they provide end-to-end solution to predict steering angles directly from the raw input images with higher accuracy. Most of these works ignore the temporal dependencies between the image frames. In this paper, we tackle the problem of utilizing multiple sets of images shared between two autonomous vehicles to improve the accuracy of controlling the steering angle by considering the temporal dependencies between the image frames. This problem has not been studied in the literature widely. We present and study a new deep architecture to predict the steering angle automatically by using Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) in our deep architecture. Our deep architecture is an end-to-end network that utilizes CNN, LSTM and fully connected (FC) layers and it uses both present and futures images (shared by a vehicle ahead via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication) as input to control the steering angle. Our model demonstrates the lowest error when compared to the other existing approaches in the literature.

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arXiv2019

Intelligent Wide-band Spectrum Classifier

We introduce a new technique for narrow-band (NB) signal classification in sparsely populated wide-band (WB) spectrum using supervised learning approach. For WB spectrum acquisition, Nyquist rate sampling is required at the receiver's analog-to-digital converter (ADC), hence we use compressed sensing (CS) theory to alleviate such high rate sampling requirement at the receiver ADC. From the estimated WB spectrum, we then extract various spectral features of each of the NB signal. These features are then used to train and classify each NB signal into its respective modulation using the random forest classifier. In the end, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under different empirical setups and verify its superior performance in comparison to a recently proposed signal classification algorithm.

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arXiv2019

V2X System Architecture Utilizing Hybrid Gaussian Process-based Model Structures

Scalable communication is of utmost importance for reliable dissemination of time-sensitive information in cooperative vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), which is, in turn, an essential prerequisite for the proper operation of the critical cooperative safety applications. The model-based communication (MBC) is a recently-explored scalability solution proposed in the literature, which has shown a promising potential to reduce the channel congestion to a great extent. In this work, based on the MBC notion, a technology-agnostic hybrid model selection policy for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is proposed which benefits from the characteristics of the non-parametric Bayesian inference techniques, specifically Gaussian Processes. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed communication architecture on both reducing the required message exchange rate and increasing the remote agent tracking precision.

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arXiv2018

Multiple Access in Cellular V2X: Performance Analysis in Highly Congested Vehicular Networks

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication enables vehicles, roadside vulnerable users, and infrastructure facilities to communicate in an ad-hoc fashion. Cellular V2X (C-V2X), which was introduced in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) release 14 standard, has recently received significant attention due to its perceived ability to address the scalability and reliability requirements of vehicular safety applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the resource allocation of the C-V2X multiple access mechanism for high-density vehicular networks, as it can strongly impact the key performance indicators such as latency and packet delivery rate. Phenomena that can affect the communication performance are investigated and a detailed analysis of the cases that can cause possible performance degradation or system limitations, is provided. The results indicate that a unified system configuration may be necessary for all vehicles, as it is mandated for IEEE 802.11p, in order to obtain the optimum performance. In the end, we show the inter-dependence of different parameters on the resource allocation procedure with the aid of our high fidelity simulator.

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arXiv2018

A Learning-Based Framework for Two-Dimensional Vehicle Maneuver Prediction over V2V Networks

Situational awareness in vehicular networks could be substantially improved utilizing reliable trajectory prediction methods. More precise situational awareness, in turn, results in notably better performance of critical safety applications, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), as well as comfort applications like Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). Therefore, vehicle trajectory prediction problem needs to be deeply investigated in order to come up with an end to end framework with enough precision required by the safety applications' controllers. This problem has been tackled in the literature using different methods. However, machine learning, which is a promising and emerging field with remarkable potential for time series prediction, has not been explored enough for this purpose. In this paper, a two-layer neural network-based system is developed which predicts the future values of vehicle parameters, such as velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate, in the first layer and then predicts the two-dimensional, i.e. longitudinal and lateral, trajectory points based on the first layer's outputs. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated in realistic cut-in scenarios from Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) dataset and the results show a noticeable improvement in the prediction accuracy in comparison with the kinematics model which is the dominant employed model by the automotive industry. Both ideal and nonideal communication circumstances have been investigated for our system evaluation. For non-ideal case, an estimation step is included in the framework before the parameter prediction block to handle the drawbacks of packet drops or sensor failures and reconstruct the time series of vehicle parameters at a desirable frequency.

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arXiv2018

Implementation and Evaluation of a Cooperative Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Safety Application

While the development of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) safety applications based on Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) has been extensively undergoing standardization for more than a decade, such applications are extremely missing for Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Nonexistence of collaborative systems between VRUs and vehicles was the main reason for this lack of attention. Recent developments in Wi-Fi Direct and DSRC-enabled smartphones are changing this perspective. Leveraging the existing V2V platforms, we propose a new framework using a DSRC-enabled smartphone to extend safety benefits to VRUs. The interoperability of applications between vehicles and portable DSRC enabled devices is achieved through the SAE J2735 Personal Safety Message (PSM). However, considering the fact that VRU movement dynamics, response times, and crash scenarios are fundamentally different from vehicles, a specific framework should be designed for VRU safety applications to study their performance. In this article, we first propose an end-to-end Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) framework to provide situational awareness and hazard detection based on the most common and injury-prone crash scenarios. The details of our VRU safety module, including target classification and collision detection algorithms, are explained next. Furthermore, we propose and evaluate a mitigating solution for congestion and power consumption issues in such systems. Finally, the whole system is implemented and analyzed for realistic crash scenarios.

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arXiv2018

Composite α-μ Based DSRC Channel Model Using Large Data Set of RSSI Measurements

Channel modeling is essential for design and performance evaluation of numerous protocols in vehicular networks. In this work, we study and provide results for largescale and small-scale modeling of communication channel in dense vehicular networks. We first propose an approach to remove the effect of fading on deterministic part of the large-scale model and verify its accuracy using a single transmitter-receiver scenario. Two-ray model is then utilized for path-loss characterization and its parameters are derived from the empirical data based on a newly proposed method. Afterward, we use α-μ distribution to model the fading behavior of vehicular networks for the first time, and validate its precision by Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) goodness-of-fit test. To this end, the significantly better performance of utilizing α-μ distribution over the most adopted fading distribution in the vehicular channels literature, i.e. Nakagami-m, in terms of passing K-S test has been investigated and statistically verified in this paper. A large received signal strength indicator (RSSI) dataset from a measurement campaign is used to evaluate our claims. Moreover, the whole model is implemented in a reliable discrete event network simulator which is widely used in the academic and industrial research for network analysis, i.e. network simulator-3 (ns-3), to show the outcome of the proposed model in the presence of upper layer network protocols.

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