Continuous Connectivity
Handover situations, such as present in infrastructure-supported cooperative perception use cases such as automated valet parking (AVP) or camera-equipped intersections, are especially taxing with respect to enabling reliable and timely data exchange. The mobile nature of vehicles inherently leads to the need for roaming across multiple access points (APs), as shadowing by stationary (e.g., walls, vegetation, …) and dynamic (e.g., other vehicles, …) obstacles will occur frequently, especially in case high-data rate technologies are used. This is already the case if small messages are exchanged, and becomes even more challenging if large object data streams with stringent real-time and reliability constraints are considered. Nevertheless, reliable and continuous sample exchange needs to be ensured in order to enable the corresponding use cases.
-
Continuous Multi-Access Communication for Large Object Streams
To address the issues of traditional handover mechanisms and enable continuous connectivity for applications streaming large data objects a continuous connectivity approach has been developed.
Read more -
Continuous Connectivity Testbed
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in the industrial domain and future connected vehicle use cases demand continuous, low-latency streaming of large (sensor) data. However, the inherent mobility of those systems causes handover delays, and thus connectivity issues, thereby leading to stream disruptions (deadline violations) and seriously compromising application performance. We present a physical testbed designed to demonstrate and evaluate such roaming situations. Furthermore, we show that continuous low-latency streaming is possible under such circumstances given proper choice of protocols, without relying on inefficient redundant data transmissions.
Read more -
Enabling Continuous Low Latency Streaming in Industrial Roaming Scenarios
Cooperation among vehicles and mobile robotic systems in industrial environments relies on wireless communication. Future roadmaps envision the integration of high-data-rate sensor streams to enhance the performance of such cooperative systems. However, the state-of-the-art in both 802.11 and cellular communication suffers from prolonged and non-deterministic connection losses, lasting up to several seconds, during roaming. As a result, the reliable transmission of large and latency-critical data in such scenarios becomes impractical. For small control data, this issue has been mitigated using redundant data streams. However, this approach is not viable for perception data streams due to excessive resource demands.
As part of the IECON 2025 – 51st Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society we present an implementation of mechanisms designed to address this challenge, with a focus on seamless deployment in industrial environments using 802.11 and Ethernet TSN backbones. Our physical model truck demonstrator confirmed the feasibility of reliable sample exchange during roaming for data rates up to 25 Mbit/s without active redundancy.
Read more
Figure 1: Sample latencies for different sample sizes during handover with the continuous streaming approach. The momentary interruption, marked by the latency peak, is fully covered by the BEC slack.