Semantic Communication for Edge Intelligence Enabled Autonomous Driving System

Abstract: Expected to provide higher transportation efficiency and security, autonomous driving has attracted substantial attentions from both industry and academia. Meanwhile, the emergence of edge intelligence has further introduced significant advancements to this field. However, the crucial demands of ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) among the vehicles and edge servers have hindered the development of autonomous driving. In this article, we provide a brief overview of edge intelligence enabled autonomous driving system and current vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies. Moreover, challenges associated with massive data transmission in autonomous driving are highlighted from three perspectives: multi-modal data transmission and fusion, multi-user collaboration and connection, and multi-task training and execution. To cope with these challenges, we propose to incorporate semantic communication into autonomous driving to achieve highly efficient and task-oriented data transmission. Unlike traditional communications, semantic communication extracts task-relevant semantic feature from multi-sensory data. Specifically, a unified multi-user semantic communication system for transmitting multi-modal data and performing multi-task execution is designed for collaborative data transmission and decision making in autonomous driving. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system can significantly reduce data transmission volume without compromising task performance, as evidenced by the realization of a cooperative multi-vehicle target classification and detection task.