Robust Video Transmission System Using 5G/4G Networks for Remote Driving

Abstract

Remote driving of vehicles using in-vehicle camera videos is essential for the uncrewed operation of automated vehicles. A remote operator views the in-vehicle camera videos to understand the situation around the vehicle and sometimes performs remote driving. Therefore, it is essential to satisfy three in-vehicle camera video transmission requirements: high image quality, low latency, and high reliability. Sub-6 and mm-Wave 5G networks are capable of high throughput and low latency video transmission and attract attention as a means of in-vehicle camera video transmission. However, 5G networks with high frequencies have narrower coverage than the existing 4G networks and are easily affected by object blockage. Therefore, cases of a sudden deterioration in network quality are likely to occur. Therefore, using 5G networks to transmit in-vehicle camera videos requires coping with sudden network quality deterioration. This paper proposes an in-vehicle camera image transmission system using 5G and 4G networks. In the proposed system, when the system detects a disturbance in the video transmitted via the 5G networks, it switches the display to the video transmitted via the 4G networks. When the 5G networks are available, the system displays the video with high quality and low latency. When unavailable, the system switches to the video transmitted via the 4G networks. We have confirmed on the network simulator that the proposed system has a shorter latency than the video transmission system using a jitter buffer to ensure reliability. In a video transmission experiment using commercial Sub-6 5G networks, we confirmed that the proposed system could detect all video disturbances and avoid the displayed video's disturbance by switching the video.