2020 International Conference on Connected and Autonomous Driving (MetroCAD)

Equinox: A Road-Side Edge Computing

Experimental Platform for CAVs
Liangkai Liu∗ , Yongtao Yao∗ , Ruijun Wang∗ , Baofu Wu∗† , and Weisong Shi∗
∗ Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA
† School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
{liangkai, yongtaoyao, ruijun, baofu.wu, weisong}@wayne.edu

Abstract—The great success of artificial intelligence and edge ! 


 "
computing technology has largely promote the development
of connected and autonomous driving. However, owing to the
missing of the experiment platform for Road-Side Unit (RSU),
majority of research works are either simulation based task of-
    
floading or commercial equipment’s based scheduling design. The
fundamental challenge of how to co-design the communication  
 
and computation in a practical system is not tackled.
In this paper, we proposed Equinox, which is our design of the




rode-side edge computing experimental platform for connected
and autonomous vehicles. With communication, data, as well   
as the computation taken into consideration, Equinox provides
stable and sufficient communication based on a combination of !
  
"

WiFi, LTE, and DSRC. Also, Equinox guarantees reliable and
flexible data collection, data storage, and efficient data processing.

Index Terms—road-side unit, connected and autonomous driv-  
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!
! 

  




 
! 
ing, edge computing  


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I. I NTRODUCTION Fig. 1. The system overview of Equinox.

Owing to the high safety and efficiency, Connected and
Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) has become the fundamental
technology for the next generation of transportation [1], [2].
According to the estimation from Intel, with complicated
sensors including cameras, radars, LiDAR, etc. installed on
the vehicle, the total amount of data generated on one vehicle
can attain 4,000TB per day. The challenge of processing this
huge amount of data efficiently pushes the services originally
provided on the cloud to the edge of the network [3]. There-
fore, both the vehicle and the Road-Side Unit (RSU) have
been implemented with powerful computing platforms, how
to leverage the computing systems together for connected and
autonomous driving applications is a remaining issue.
Recently, lots of works have been working on how to lever-
age the computing resources on the RSU for the applications
running on top of the vehicle. Numerous research works and
projects are focused on how to schedule the offloading of
tasks onto the RSU [4], [5]. However, these works are not
implemented and evaluated on real RSU prototype. Another
portion of research works aim at designing a initial prototype
to realize RSU platform [6].However, they are all based
on single communication method. In summary, there is no
standard design as well as the prototype of the RSU.
In this paper, we proposed Equinox, which is a road-
side edge computing experimental platform for connected and
autonomous vehicles. As is shown in Figure II, Equinox is
composed of three main layers: communication later, data
layer, and the computation layer. The communication layer
enables Equinox to communicate with vehicles in three ways:
WiFi, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), and
LTE. Since huge amount of data could be uploaded and stored
on the RSU, the data layer is proposed to include the data
generation and data storage into the system of Equinox. Hence,
a Network-attached storage (NAS) and several Solid State
Drives (SSD) are designed to be included in Equinox. In
addition, Equinox is supposed to perform sensing and percep-
tion based on its own sensors. Through this design, Equinox
not only provides computation resources for offloading tasks
running on the vehicle, but also broadcasts traffic information
through its own sensing and perception process. Last but not
least, Equinox is designed with a heterogeneous computation
layer, in which a CPU cluster with Field-Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) accelerator, GPU, as well as edge Tensor
Process Unit (TPU). This heterogeneous computing platform
is used to provide efficient processing of CAV applications
especially machine learning based algorithms.
II. S YSTEM D ESIGN
The goal of Equinox is to provide not only resources like
computation and storage, but also the traffic information which
is essentially extracted through the sensing and perception
of Equinox. From Figure II, we understand the function and

978-1-7281-6059-7/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 41

DOI 10.1109/MetroCAD48866.2020.00014

Authorized licensed use limited to: Carleton University. Downloaded on July 28,2020 at 06:43:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
objective of each layer. In this Section, firstly we discuss the
overall design of Equinox, followed by the detailed design of
each layer.
A. Communication Layer
The communication layer is supposed to provide reliable
and sufficient communication between the vehicle and RSU,
which can be represent as vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) in
short. To the best of our knowledge, majority of the-state-of-
the-art works focused on leverage the V2I communications for
the sharing of important warning information for the safety
purpose. The biggest challenge for these research works is
how to provide reliable bandwidth even in mobile environ-
ment. For example, DSRC is able to provide reliable V2X
communications even when the vehicle is driving 120 km/h
but the communication coverage and bandwidth are limited. In
contract, WiFi based communication provides high bandwidth
but is also limited by the coverage while LTE based communi-
cation doesn’t has the coverage and bandwidth limitation but
neither of them can provide stable communication in mobile
scenario.
Therefore, the communication layer of Equinox combines
these three types of communication mechanism together. As
a complimentary to each other, Equinox achieves reliable
and sufficient V2I communication. The choose of which
communication mechanism to use is based on the whether
the application is data-driven or latency-driven, as well as the
state of the vehicle and Equinox.
In terms of implementation, all the computing boards within
Equinox are equipped with WiFi antenna. An NI USRP based
board is deployed on Equinox to provide LTE based com-
munications, while OpenAirInterface based software makes
it can be programmable for higher level applications. For
DSRC, a Road Side Entity (RSE) with an On Board Entity
(OBD) is deployed on Equinox and vehicle respectively. An
24-port Ethernet switch with a router is deployed in Equinox to
make all the communication, storage, and computing devices
connected and accessible to each other. RSE is also connected
to the the switch.
B. Data Layer
Driven by the goal of supporting not only data and com-
putation offloading but also traffic information perception and
broadcasting, there can be huge amount of variety of data
generated and processed on Equinox. How to store the data
efficiently on Equinox is the first challenge. In our proposed
design, a Network-attached storage (NAS) which has five 10T
of hard disk and five 1T of SSD will be deployed on Equinox.
NAS is also connected to the Ethernet switch to make it
accessible to other components. In terms of NAS, another
challenge is how to manage the data, since some data should
be open to developers in a security and privacy preserving way
while some data can be out of date and should be compressed
or even permanently deleted.
Besides NAS, another important part of the data layer is the
sensors. One of the biggest reason we also consider sensors
42
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on the RSU is to make it capable of sensing and perception
the environment because the RSU is usually installed fixed
and it gets a better view on the traffic compared with the
vehicle. Making the RSU become intelligent is the key to
leverage the traffic infrastructures to improve the vehicle’s
safety. On Equinox, currently we installed three surveillance
cameras which get a bird-view of the indoor autonomous
driving robots.
C. Computation Layer
As an essential portion of Equinox, the computation layer
is responsible for the sensing and perception of Equinox’s
environment, the execution of tasks offloaded from the vehicle,
and the manage of the communication as well as the stor-
age system. Considering the percentage of machine learning
especially deep learning based applications, a heterogeneous
computation platform is proposed in Equinox.
The proposed heterogeneous computation platform includes
four Inter Fog Reference based CPU-FPGA cluster, four Edge
TPU based cluster, and an NVIDIA GPU. In particular, each
Intel Fog Reference has Xeon E3 CPU and Cyclone V FPGA
board. The memory size of Intel Fog Reference is 32 GB.
Edge TPU is designed to accelerate the model inference on
the edge. Each edge TPU board has a Integrated GC7000 GPU,
1GB RAM and 8 GB of flash memory. The NVIDIA GPU is
NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier, which is the newest version for
autonomous driving vehicle and we use it to accelerate both
model training and inference.
All the computing devices are connected to the Ethernet
switch. For the software part, all the devices are linux-based
system and we use Spark to manage the application running
in the whole system and ROS to mange data sharing process
between the vehicle and Equinox.
R EFERENCES
[1] Y. Wang, L. Liu, X. Zhang, and W. Shi, “HydraOne: An indoor exper-
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“OpenVDAP: An open vehicular data analytics platform for CAVs,”
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challenges,” IEEE internet of things journal, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 637–646,
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