Wireless Distributed Consensus in Vehicle to Vehicle Networks for Autonomous Driving

Vital societal and industrial autonomous components are increasingly interconnected through communication networks to complete critical tasks cooperatively. However, as the reliability and trust requirements for connected autonomous systems continue to grow, the centralized communication and decision approaches that are in use today are reaching their limits. Focusing on autonomous driving applications, this paper proposes a resilient and trustworthy framework on wireless distributed consensus networks, where the communication links are less reliable or are even in the presence of incorrect local sensor readings/decisions. To accomplish that, a novel three stages consensus mechanism is proposed based on the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT), where the veto collection and gossip stages are designed to meet the stringent and complex requirements for a vehicle's maneuvers. A plan tree synthesis is also proposed to make consensus on a series of decisions while adopting network members' decision preferences. A detailed protocol including the distributed consensus, plan tree synthesis, dynamic grouping, etc. is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed consensus mechanism is able to be reached and propagated through the network under poor wireless communication conditions and the presence of faulty vehicles with incorrect sensor readings. The result can be extended to other autonomous systems to significantly enhance safety in critical industrial applications.