A Novel Deep-Learning Model for Remote Driver Monitoring in SDN-Based Internet of Autonomous Vehicles Using 5G Technologies

Abstract

The rapid advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and its integration with Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are expected to play a crucial role in future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Additionally, the continuous progress in the industry of autonomous vehicles will accelerate and increase their short adoption in smart cities to allow safe, sustainable and accessible trips for passengers in different public and private means of transportation. In this article, we investigate the adoption of 5G different technologies, mainly, the Software-Defined Networks (SDN) to support the communication requirements of delegation of control of level-2 autonomous vehicles to the Remote-Control Center (RCC) in terms of ultra-low delay and reliability. This delegation occurs upon the detection of a drowsy driver using our proposed deep-learning-based technique deployed at the edge to reduce the level of accidents and road congestion. The deep learning-based model was evaluated and produced higher accuracy, precision and recall when compared to other methods. The role of SDN is to implement network slicing to achieve the Quality of Service (QoS) level required in this emergency case. Decreasing the end-to-end delay required to provide feedback control signals back to the autonomous vehicle is the aim of deploying QoS support available in an SDN-based network. Feedback control signals are sent to remotely activate the stopping system or to switch the vehicle to direct teleoperation mode. The mininet-WiFi emulator is deployed to evaluate the performance of the proposed adaptive SDN framework, which is tailored to emulate radio access networks. Our simulation experiments conducted on realistic vehicular scenarios revealed significant improvement in terms of throughput and average Round-Trip Time (RTT).