Reciprocal impact of autonomous vehicles and network resource management

Autonomous driving is a vision that seems likely to be realized sooner than expected; the industry and research community are actively coordinating on achieving the goals of different levels of automation. One obvious and important aspect of autonomous driving is efficient and reliable connectivity both within and around the vehicle. Autonomous vehicles should be able to communicate with their environment and remote data analysis platforms in real-time, which qualifies the telecommunication industry as an important stakeholder in the autonomous driving ecosystem. In particular, the highly stringent connectivity requirements of an autonomous vehicle, its trajectory planning system, and the resource planning of the communication service provider are highly interdependent on each other. In this paper, we study the relationship between route planning systems in autonomous vehicles and resource management systems of telecom operators, explaining how a bidirectional interface among the two would induce higher efficiency on both ends. We also provide an overview of an urban test field for autonomous and connected driving in Berlin, which will serve as a testbed for experimenting with the concepts presented in this work.