V2X Communication
V2X: Vehicle-to-Everything
Momentum
6 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 48
Vehicle-infrastructure cooperation can complement onboard sensing with broader and more informative observations of the traffic environment, providing valuable support for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing cooperative driving methods mainly exploit roadside information to enhance the representation of the current scene, while the future consequences of prospective driving actions are rarely modeled explicitly. This limits the ability of the planner to anticipate how its decisions may interact with the evolving traffic environment. To address this issue, we propose V2X-WAM, a cooperative world action model that tightly couples cooperative scene understanding, action generation, and future-world reasoning. V2X-WAM constructs a reliability-aware spatiotemporal representation from vehicle- and infrastructure-side observations, while compressing infrastructure information into a compact quantized message for efficient communication. Based on the resulting cooperative representation, a multimodal planner generates prospective trajectories, which explicitly condition future occupancy and dynamic-flow prediction. The predicted world consequences are then fed back to refine the planned trajectory, forming a closed interaction between action and future-world evolution. Experiments on a large-scale real-world cooperative driving dataset demonstrate that V2X-WAM consistently improves planning accuracy and safety over representative end-to-end cooperative driving methods, while achieving stronger future-world prediction and substantially lower communication overhead. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed design.
SemRD-V2X: Closure-Guided Communication with Bounded Inference for Cooperative Perception
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) cooperative perception improves 3-D detection by sharing intermediate features, but dense remote features may repeat context that the ego agent can infer locally. Most communication-efficient designs optimize masks or codes empirically, leaving a more basic question open: which remote evidence is indispensable given the receiver's own observation? We introduce a closure-fidelity perspective on ego conditioned remote perception. Under a finite deductive abstraction and explicit conditions, its rate--distortion function decomposes over an irredundant core, and the exact zero-distortion rate becomes . This analysis suggests a concrete design principle: transmit compact evidence and recover derivable context with bounded receiver-side inference. Guided by this principle, SemRD-V2X is an operational neural proxy that combines exact-budget BEV support selection, pointwise channel compression, and masked shared-weight reconstruction before standard fusion. Experiments on simulated V2XSet and real-world DAIR-V2X validate the resulting design. In a controlled five-run V2XSet comparison against a locally reproduced V2X-ViT-v1 baseline on one Tesla V100, SemRD-V2X reduces the analytical feature payload by while improving [email protected]/[email protected] by 4.13/8.57 points, with 3.81% additional mean compute latency. These results position closure fidelity as both an analytical lens and an actionable design principle for communication-efficient cooperative perception.
Dense Coverage, Sparse Refinement: Byte-Constrained Cooperative Perception
Collaborative perception improves autonomous perception by sharing intermediate Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features across connected agents, but dense feature exchange is difficult to deploy under strict Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) bandwidth limits. Existing efficient methods typically either compress the full feature map uniformly, spending bits on low-value background, or sparsify communication, risking the loss of useful context. We propose a coverage-refinement design for byte-constrained cooperative perception: each agent transmits a highly compressed coarse layer over the full BEV map and allocates the remaining budget to selected high-resolution patches. A Task-Aware Benefit Selector ranks cells by estimated downstream utility, enabling deterministic budgeted refinement and zero-retraining adaptation to changing bandwidth. The receiver reconstructs a dense BEV tensor compatible with standard fusion modules. Experiments on DAIR-V2X and OPV2V show strong accuracy-payload trade-offs at kilobyte-scale budgets. On DAIR-V2X, our method reaches 0.60 [email protected] at only 1.87 KB per non-ego agent, compared with 0.52 at 4.61 KB for uniform SimVQ compression. Controlled diagnostics further show that the gain arises from coverage-refinement allocation rather than quantization alone. Code will be published.
NS3Learn: Transferring 5G NR Mode-2 Reception Realism from ns-3 to the Veins/SUMO Stack for Connected-Vehicle Safety Assessment
Connected-vehicle safety evaluations rely on coupled traffic and network simulations, but standard channel models ignore radio resource competition in 5G NR sidelink Mode-2, reporting unrealistically high message delivery in dense traffic. This study introduces resource-competition losses without requiring full protocol reimplementation. We labeled 10.5 million reception outcomes from ns-3 5G-LENA traces (calibrated on 3GPP scenarios and driven by SUMO trajectories) to fit NS3Learn - a closed-form model capturing half-duplex loss, scheduling collisions, receiver capture, and decoding. Evaluation spanned two signalized urban networks, six penetration levels (1-100%), and five random seeds per condition. NS3Learn achieved a mean absolute deviation of 0.06 in per-instant delivery compared to ns-3 5G-LENA, outperforming alternative models (0.44 and 0.55 deviation). Fitted parameters transferred to a distinct intersection with only 20% additional error. Crucially, using realistic communication models reversed simulated traffic speed trends and more than doubled predicted hard-braking events. The framework transfers reception realism between simulators via model distillation instead of full reimplementation. Every stage maps directly to an explicit physical mechanism. Researchers and transportation agencies can maintain existing simulation pipelines while accurately accounting for dense-traffic packet loss and denial-of-service impacts. Adapting to new radio configurations requires only offline refitting rather than code modification.
VAST: V2X/Dynamic Map-Aware Autonomous Driving Systems Validation Toolchain
Cooperative autonomous driving in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud continuum requires system-level validation across vehicles, infrastructure sensors, edge-side Dynamic Map services, and in-vehicle autonomous-driving stacks. This paper presents VAST, a V2X/Dynamic Map-aware validation toolchain that connects Scenic, Scenario Simulator v2, AWSIM, Autoware, and SIM-LDM. VAST does not introduce a new search algorithm; instead, it addresses interoperability challenges, including Lanelet2-to-Scenic mapping, ROS 2-based co-simulation through SS2, Dynamic Map object injection into Autoware, and collection of TTC, PET, collision, timeout, and performance measurements. In occluded-intersection scenarios, Lanelet2-compatible constrained sampling increases the edge-case discovery rate from 40.0% to 80.0% and reduces the average time per discovered edge case from 259.7 s to 110.4 s. Under the same generated scenario distribution, Dynamic Map availability reduces the collision rate from 78.0% to 40.0% and increases non-collision outcomes from 22.0% to 60.0%, with statistically significant TTC/PET shifts. A throughput study with 1-16 NPCs shows that sampling remains below 0.1 s, whereas AWSIM/Autoware execution and restart overhead dominate runtime. These results position VAST as a practical validation infrastructure for cooperative autonomous-driving CPSs.
Robust Beam Prediction for V2X Networks with Multi-Modal Sensing
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) provides a promising foundation for beam prediction in future vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks. However, existing sensing-assisted beamforming methods still rely heavily on radio-frequency sensing, which may become unreliable in complex vehicular environments. Meanwhile, the growing availability of heterogeneous sensors, such as cameras and LiDAR, offers new opportunities to improve beam prediction through richer environmental perception. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a multi-modal beam prediction framework for V2X networks. Specifically, we develop BeamTransFuser, a hierarchical Transformer-based architecture that progressively fuses camera, LiDAR, radar, and GPS observations for robust beam prediction. In addition, to handle possible missing modalities in practical deployment, we introduce a generative module that reconstructs missing modality features from the available observations. Experimental results on a real-world multi-modal V2X dataset show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms representative baselines, while the generative module further improves robustness under incomplete sensing conditions.
SPADE: SPaT Attack Detection from the Connected Vehicle's Perspective
Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) messages are a cornerstone of connected vehicle (CV) safety, enabling CVs to perceive and respond to intersection state through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. The integrity of these messages is threatened by a range of application-layer attacks that can bypass conventional authentication when a roadside unit or peer vehicle is compromised. Existing intrusion detection research either defends the infrastructure side or targets V2V Basic Safety Message (BSM) / Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) misbehavior, leaving the onboard CV perspective on SPaT integrity unaddressed.To close this gap, we introduce SPADE --- the SPaT Attack Detection and Evaluation dataset --- a labelled, multi-modal, simulation-based dataset designed specifically for deep learning IDS research in this space. SPADE is generated through Eclipse MOSAIC using runtime attack injection at the SAE J2735 application layer across six attack classes and one benign class. By combining four intersection geometries, six operating conditions, and five independent random-seed repetitions, SPADE comprises 180 unique base scenario runs, yielding 1,890,000 labelled timestep records (270,000 per class). Each record fuses SPaT message fields, onboard camera confidence scores, and cooperative V2V peer data across 40 features, reflecting the multi-modal signal space required to distinguish deliberate attacks from environmental degradation. The dataset, generation code, and scenario configurations are released publicly to support reproducible and comparative IDS research in C-V2X security. The developed toolbox, instructions, and dataset link are publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/jdinovo/SPADE.
DH-VLM: Dual-Horizon Cooperative Latent Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
Large-scale language models for autonomous driving enable enhanced global understanding and long-horizon planning. However, when deployed in isolated vehicles, limited sensing range and occlusions restrict reliable decision-making, and the substantial computational and latency overhead makes on-board deployment impractical. Cooperative driving provides a potential solution by leveraging external agents for information exchange, but existing methods remain limited in semantic reasoning capability under practical constraints. To address these challenges, we propose DH-VLM, a dual-horizon cooperative latent reasoning framework that enables asymmetric semantic cooperation between the infrastructure and ego vehicle. The infrastructure aggregates multi-layer hidden states to form a global-reasoning horizon latent guidance, which is integrated into the ego model through an Infrastructure-Driven Latent Evolution mechanism for conditional latent refinement. This enables the ego vehicle to leverage long-range contextual understanding while preserving autonomous decision-making within its local planning horizon. Furthermore, we construct a cooperation-oriented question-answer (QA) dataset covering fundamental scene understanding and ego-personalized comprehension to support counterfactual and safety-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DH-VLM achieves state-of-the-art planning performance, outperforming the previous state of the art by 14.6% in L2 error and 26.9% in collision rate. Compared with query-based end-to-end cooperative driving methods, our approach reduces the communication cost by 57.3% and GPU memory usage by 25.5%, while maintaining strong robustness against infrastructure guidance errors, providing a practical and robust paradigm for cooperative autonomous driving.
An Inline Control Architecture for Language Models in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems increasingly incorporate large language models (LLMs) for semantic tasks such as message summarization, operator assistance, and decision support at roadside units and edge nodes. Although these components are not part of safety-critical control loops, they introduce prompt-level attack surfaces that are not addressed by traditional V2X security mechanisms focused on authentication and message integrity. This paper presents Guarded-V2X, an inline semantic guardrail architecture for securing LLM-enabled V2X services under real-time constraints. The proposed system integrates rule-based ingress filtering, a lightweight safety classifier, policy-constrained structured generation, trusted-only retrieval, and post-decision adjudication to enforce machine-checkable safety boundaries prior to downstream execution. Guarded-V2X is evaluated using a four-stage experimental pipeline encompassing intrusion vulnerability analysis, calibration and latency benchmarking, guardrail validation, and robustness under adversarial stress. Experiments are conducted on a V2X-aligned simulated dataset derived from RSU advisories, operator messages, and annotated V2X message summaries. Results show that unguarded and prompt-only baselines retain residual vulnerability under multi-turn adversarial trials, while Guarded-V2X consistently reduces intrusion acceptance success rates and eliminates observed unsafe completions in two-turn settings, without exceeding latency budgets for V2X semantic advisory paths.
Domain-Generalized Adaptive Semantic Communication for Collaborative Perception
We propose RSTA, a domain-generalized semantic communication framework enabling source-free V2X collaborative perception under both observation-domain shift and unseen wireless channel conditions. In V2X, received semantic tokens suffer coupled degradation from pre-transmission domain drift and in-transit channel corruption; existing methods address only one source, leaving adaptation misled by tokens that are simultaneously off-domain and physically degraded. RSTA trains a pre-deployment semantic encoder for transmission stability via cross-domain prototype alignment and cross-channel gradient consistency, and updates a lightweight in-deployment decoder adapter through reliability-gated entropy minimization that restricts gradients to tokens ranked high in both semantic relevance and channel fidelity. A theoretical task robustness decomposition links each loss term to a distinct degradation source, grounding each algorithmic component in a measurable error mode. Trained on AWGN and tested on unseen Rayleigh fading, RSTA achieves +7.2 [email protected] over pre-deployment domain generalization on cross-weather tasks and +5.5 on cross-dataset tasks across four V2X benchmarks, updating only 0.21% of parameters in-deployment with zero inter-agent synchronization overhead.
SimBEV2X: A Large-Scale Dataset and Data Generation Tool for Multi-Task Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception
Cooperative perception through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication can overcome the inherent physical limitations of individual autonomous vehicles, such as occlusions and limited sensor range. However, the development of robust V2X algorithms, particularly those relying on unified spatial representations like bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, is hampered by the lack of large-scale, multi-modal, multi-task datasets. Moreover, collecting and annotating a large set of synchronized, real-world multi-agent data is prohibitively expensive. This has resulted in a landscape where existing V2X datasets are notably limited in both size and scope. To overcome this, we introduce SimBEV2X, an advanced synthetic data generation tool built on the CARLA simulator. SimBEV2X automatically creates randomized driving scenarios to collect multi-modal sensor data alongside various types of ground truth including 3D bounding boxes with unique track IDs, HD map information, BEV segmentation maps, and semantic occupancy voxel grids from both vehicles and RSUs. We also present the SimBEV2X dataset, the largest V2X perception dataset to date. The dataset comprises 258 scenes, each involving up to 8 connected vehicles and up to 4 RSUs across a variety of road networks. The SimBEV2X dataset is an order of magnitude larger than existing V2X datasets and contains 102,200 frames, 588,520 lidar point clouds, more than 3 million images, over 27 million bounding boxes, and a comprehensive set of other annotations. Finally, we establish a strong baseline on the SimBEV2X dataset using CoopDet3D and propose CoBEVFusion, a novel architecture that combines CoopDet3D with fused axial attention (FAX) for context-aware multi-agent feature aggregation, resulting in superior performance. SimBEV2X, the SimBEV2X dataset, and CoBEVFusion are available at https://simbev2x.org and https://github.com/GoodarzMehr/SimBEV2X.
Defer to Plan: Adaptive Multi-Agent Fusion for End-to-End V2X Driving
Vehicle-to-everything-aided autonomous driving (V2X-AD) significantly enhances driving performance through information sharing. However, existing collaborative perception methods only optimize module-level perception capabilities and fail to effectively serve the ultimate planning and control tasks. We propose an end-to-end collaborative driving system that directly optimizes planning task performance. The system employs MotionNetwork to fuse historical temporal information, utilizes attention mechanisms to efficiently compress spatial features into compact tokens, and adaptively fuses multi-agent features through an autoregressive decoder. Additionally, we introduce Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to enhance the model's representation capacity for heterogeneous features. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 79.72, surpassing the state-of-the-art CoDriving baseline (77.15) by 3.33% in closed-loop evaluation while maintaining communication efficiency.
MIND-CAVs: Multi-Intelligence Negotiation and Decision System for CAVs based on Intent-Driven Autonomy
Modern autonomous vehicles largely operate as isolated agents: they rely on on-board perception and decision modules and broadcast Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) that expose only low-level kinematic state. While existing cooperative driving frameworks enable limited sensor sharing, they rarely communicate high-level maneuver intentions, and edge computing is primarily used for content delivery rather than decision arbitration. As a result, current connected autonomy lacks a principled mechanism for making globally consistent, intent-aware coordination decisions across vehicles. To address this gap, we propose MIND-CAVs, a Multi-Intelligence Negotiation and Decision framework for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) based on intent-driven autonomy. Each vehicle abstracts raw sensor observations into structured intent representations, exchanges them over V2X links, and receives globally consistent coordination plans from roadside edge servers. Edge agents combine learned and rule-based arbitration mechanisms to negotiate conflicting intents among vehicles, while a cloud platform records decisions for auditing and continual retraining. We implement MIND-CAVs in a CARLA-based AI-in-the-loop platform and evaluate it in multi-lane highway scenarios involving conflicting maneuvers and route-constrained exits. Experimental results show improved maneuver completion time and reduced unsafe proximity and unnecessary braking compared with isolated autonomy, first-come-first-served arbitration, and multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines.
Low-Latency Relay Selection in NR-V2X Vehicular Communications via Graph Isomorphism Networks with Edge Features
Reliable, low-latency uplink connectivity is a key requirement for C-V2X networks in dense urban environments, where fast channel variations and blockages often degrade direct vehicle-to-infrastructure links. Multi-hop relaying can restore coverage, but relay-link activation under radio, capacity, and routing constraints results in an NP-hard optimisation problem, typically solved via Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), whose runtime scales poorly with graph size. This paper introduces an edge-aware Learning-to-Optimise framework for real-time relay selection. Each V2X snapshot is modelled as a directed graph: node features encode vehicle state and traffic demand, while edge features capture radio-link capacity. An offline MILP oracle generates optimal relay configurations that supervise a Graph Isomorphism Network with Edge Features (GINE), enabling edge-level relay activation through a single forward pass, with tightly bounded inference latency. To bridge learning and exact optimisation, we also propose a hybrid GINE-Pruned MILP (GP-MILP) strategy in which GINE predictions prune the MILP search space. Experiments on a large-scale dataset generated via an OSM-SUMO-GEMV pipeline show that GINE closely matches MILP decisions at the link level (accuracy 0.9589), F1-score (0.9544) on validation) and yields consistent end-to-end connectivity gains over a 1-hop MILP baseline (up to 9.2% with four RSUs and 12% with two RSUs). Inference latency remains tightly bounded, with all evaluated instances completing within 5ms. Moreover, GP-MILP preserves MILP-equivalent solutions (same objective value) while achieving solver runtimes below 30ms for more than 98%) of the graph instances, making MILP-grade optimisation compatible with stringent NR-V2X latency budgets.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for C-V2X RAT Selection
Vehicles are increasingly equipped with advanced V2X communication capabilities. While early V2X apps utilized services such as Cooperative Awareness Messages, recent developments have allowed more advanced applications including cooperative driving, shared perception, and sensor-sharing services. The broader mix of applications leads to heterogeneous requirements for latency and reliability. At the same time multiple communication technologies for V2X are available with pros and cons. Hybrid V2X communication can exploit the distinct advantages at the right moment to fulfill the requirements of the applications. This work studies the decision problem between cellular Uu link, NR-V2X PC5 sidelink, and the simultaneous use of both channels. We address this problem by using the multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm MAPPO and compare it to five baselines consisting of a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach, a static decision tree approach and static channel selection strategies. The methods are evaluated in an urban scenario and with a set of selected communication use cases. The evaluation results show that when compared to the DRL approach, the on-time delivery ratio improves from 0.508 to 0.535 in a single-controlled-vehicle setting and from 0.548 to 0.567 when all vehicles follow the learned policy and reduces the training time by half. The gains result mainly from the advanced applications scenarios, as opposed to scenarios involving exclusively CAM messaging. This indicates future applications will benefit from such adaptive communication strategies and that multi-agent modelling is useful for addressing the underlying decision problem.
How the Fusion of Onboard Sensors and V2X Data can Improve (or not) the Cooperative Perception of Connected Automated Vehicles
Automated vehicles rely on onboard sensors to perceive their surroundings and navigate autonomously. However, sensor performance may degrade under adverse weather conditions or when line-of-sight is obstructed. Cooperative perception (or collective perception) is expected to mitigate these limitations by enabling Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to share sensor data and collaboratively enhance situational awareness. Several studies have analyzed the potential of cooperative perception, yet the fusion of V2X data with information from onboard sensors has received limited focus. V2X data may contain errors that affect the quality of the fused data, and hence the effectiveness of cooperative perception. This study analyzes the impact of sensing measurement errors, V2X packet losses, and GNSS inaccuracies on the effectiveness of cooperative perception. The results highlight the potential of cooperative perception to enhance perception levels and range compared to using onboard sensors alone. However, they also identify key challenges related to the generation of ghost vehicles during the fusion process, which must be addressed to prevent V2X data from introducing additional errors when fused with onboard sensor data.
Agentic-V2X: Small Language Model Agents for Deadline-Aware V2X Scheduling in 5G/6G Networks
Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as control interfaces for next-generation networks, but their latency, hallucinations, and lack of control guarantees make them unsuitable for near-real-time packet schedulers, especially in dynamic V2X environments. This paper introduces Agentic-V2X, an architecture where a small, locally deployed language model acts as a periodic non-real-time rApp-inspired policy creator, while a lightweight xApp-like controller executes validated policies at intervals suitable for scheduling. The framework targets deadline-aware 5G NR V2X scheduling with heterogeneous services (teleoperated driving, cooperative awareness, HD map sharing, and sensor sharing). Given a scenario summary, service objective, and telemetry, the LLM generates a structured policy containing service priorities, weight bounds, and safety constraints. A validator checks and repairs the policy before the controller enforces it via scheduler-weight adaptation in ns-3/ns3-ai. The evaluation compares proportional fair scheduling, static expert policies, a heuristic xApp, static LLM policies, and adaptive LLM-rApp policies over 126 completed runs. Metrics include deadline-constrained packet reception ratio, tail latency, deadline violations, throughput, fairness, policy validity, and safety interventions. Results show that the adaptive LLM-rApp/xApp design generates valid and executable policies and remains competitive at several operating points, including improved mean critical reliability over PF at the highest density. However, paired statistical analysis shows that the adaptive method is not the best aggregate method and remains below the strongest static policies overall. These results support Agentic-V2X as a safe, executable small-LLM policy-generation architecture rather than a universally dominant scheduler.
Beyond Line of Sight: Hybrid Validation of V2X Collective Perception in Complex Scenarios
This paper introduces a probabilistic framework and hybrid validation methodology for V2X-enabled Collective Perception (CP) in complex traffic scenarios. The proposed Bayesian fusion algorithm extends the perceptual horizon of connected and autonomous vehicles by integrating heterogeneous sensor observations from multiple agents into a shared probabilistic occupancy grid. Each cell of this grid encapsulates both occupancy likelihood and uncertainty, enabling explainable and trustworthy situational awareness beyond the ego vehicle's field of view. To bridge the gap between simulation and real-world evaluation, a hybrid testing framework is developed, combining CARLA-based virtual environments with vehicle-in-the-loop experimentation. Experimental results in a roundabout scenario demonstrate a 260 percent increase in field-of-view coverage and a rise in occupied-cell recall from 0.82 (ego-only) to 0.94 (six-agent CP) under nominal localization conditions. Overall, the proposed approach provides a reproducible and interpretable foundation for validating CP systems, supporting the safe and certifiable deployment of cooperative autonomous vehicles.
HydraCollab: Adaptive Collaborative-Perception for Distributed Autonomous Systems
Collaborative-perception enables multi-robot systems to enhance situational awareness by sharing perceptual information. Existing collaborative-perception systems face an inherent trade-off between communication bandwidth requirements and perception accuracy, where methods that exchange more information achieve better perception results at the cost of increased communication overhead. However, real-world communication networks impose bandwidth constraints that require minimizing communication overhead without sacrificing perception performance. To address this challenge, we propose HydraCollab, an adaptive collaborative-perception framework that (i) selectively transmits the most informative sensor features and (ii) dynamically employs collaboration strategies (intermediate or late) based on spatial confidence maps. Extensive evaluations on the V2X-R, V2X-Radar and UAV3D-mini datasets demonstrate that HydraCollab achieves the best overall trade-off between accuracy and communication cost among existing collaborative-perception methods. Relative to SOTA Where2comm, HydraCollab uses only 41% of the bandwidth on V2X-R and 26% on V2X-Radar while improving performance by 0.78% and 0.75% respectively. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/AICPS/HydraCollab.
Exploiting Overlapping Fields of View for Redundancy-Aware Uplink Transmission in Vehicular 6G
Emerging uplink-dominant 6G use cases, such as cooperative vehicular streaming, require efficient transmission of high-volume visual data over limited wireless resources. While semantic communications can reduce traffic by prioritizing task-relevant content, most existing approaches treat users independently and therefore overlook spatial redundancy among nearby devices' observations. This paper proposes a semantic-aware multiple access scheme that exploits overlapping fields of view among vehicular users to reduce redundant uplink transmissions. We formulate a joint perception and transmission control problem in which users decide which image patches to transmit, when to transmit them, and over which channel, subject to communication constraints. To address the resulting complexity, we introduce a practical two-phase approach. First, nearby vehicles share selected observation patches over Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) links to calculate inter-user spatial redundancy. Second, users transmit only semantically important, non-redundant patches to the base station, where observations can be reconstructed using the received patches and complementary views from neighboring vehicles. Simulation results in a dense urban vehicular scenario demonstrate that our approach improves the proportion of users who achieve high-fidelity reconstruction, highlighting the potential of semantic-aware multiple access for sustainable and resource-efficient 6G uplink systems.
CooperScene: Multi-Modal Cooperative Autonomy Benchmark with C-V2X Communication Characterization
Cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) enables cooperative perception, prediction, and planning beyond the field of view of individual agents. However, existing datasets often overlook the complexities of real-world deployment, such as limited communication bandwidth and its dynamics, heterogeneous sensing modalities, and scalability beyond a single cooperative partner. In this paper, we introduce CooperScene, a high-fidelity cooperative autonomy dataset with real-world C-V2X communication characterization. The dataset is organized into diverse scenes, including intersections, highway ramps, and parking lots. These scenes involve three connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and one infrastructure roadside unit (RSU), all equipped with multi-modal sensors and commercial off-the-shelf C-V2X communication radios. All scenes are annotated with globally consistent 3D labels at 10 Hz, totaling 344K objects across 59K frames, underpinned by tight sensor- and agent-synchronization, centimeter-level localization and spatial alignment, precise cross-modality calibration, and 3GPP-standard-compliant C-V2X communication. CooperScene establishes a rigorous benchmark for evaluating multi-agent scaling and actual performance in real-world deployable settings. Project website for data and benchmark: https://cisl.ucr.edu/CooperScene
DinoLink: A Token-Centric Representation Compression Framework for Bandwidth-Constrained Collaborative V2X Perception
High-precision remote perception is often hindered by the severe bandwidth constraints of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks. We propose \textit{DinoLink}, a token-centric compression framework that replaces raw pixel streaming with discrete semantic communication for vehicle-cloud collaborative inference. DinoLink employs a dual-sparsity architecture: a saliency-aware selector prunes redundant background tokens, while a Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) module collapses features into compact codebook indices. By transmitting only lightweight indices and positional priors, DinoLink achieves a bitrate reduction compared to uncompressed transmission while maintaining a competitive 32.8% mAP on the nuScenes dataset. Deployment simulations further demonstrate a acceleration in narrow-band environments, such as LoRa. Our results substantiate DinoLink as a robust, bandwidth-efficient frontend for high-fidelity remote perception in constrained V2X scenarios. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UGA-MOBILITY-LAB/dino_link.
Importance of Intent-Sharing for V2X-based Maneuver Coordination
This paper examines the critical role of intent-sharing in enabling effective maneuver coordination for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). Successful maneuver coordinations require vehicles to accurately know other vehicles' driving intentions. Intent-sharing can be achieved by the remote vehicles directly communicating their plans with the ego vehicle, as opposed to the ego vehicle predicting the trajectory on the remote vehicles' behalf. In this paper, we investigate the potential of intent-sharing on maneuver coordination effectiveness by quantifying the percentage of successful coordinations. We analyze the potential of intent-sharing by comparing its effectiveness for coordinated lane changes in a highway scenario with the effectiveness of a trajectory prediction method based on current kinematic data. Our analysis demonstrates in two scenarios substantial improvements in maneuver coordination when CAVs have direct access to the nearby vehicles' driving intentions through intent sharing. These findings highlight the importance of including intent-sharing in the maneuver coordination protocol.
OmniV2X: A Generative Foundation Planner for Efficient End-to-End Cooperative Driving
We present OmniV2X, a generative foundation model for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cooperative driving. The model directly interprets independent context sequences comprising multi-modal and multi-agent observations. The new design mitigates the computational cost of dense 3D perception, the vulnerability to data scarcity in cooperative scenarios, and the poor compliance with standardized messaging in existing methods that fuse multi-modal inputs into a shared representation. For training, we present an end-to-end supervised pipeline using a downstream trajectory generation loss, in which a high-capacity generative sequence planner implicitly learns to steer the model and leverage multi-modal inputs via cross-attention injection. As a foundation model, we demonstrate that OmniV2X pre-trained on large-scale single-agent planning datasets can efficiently adapt to cooperative environments by integrating the conditioning context with lightweight, standard-compliant V2X tokens. Evaluated on the DAIR-V2X-Seq dataset, OmniV2X outperforms existing end-to-end cooperative driving baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance with less than 10% of the fine-tune V2X dataset and less than 1% of the communication bandwidth. We conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate its computational efficiency and robustness under real-world constraints.
CABLE: Cloud-Assisted Bandwidth-efficient LMM-based Encoding for V2X Systems
Cloud-hosted large multimodal models (LMMs) can provide strong open-vocabulary perception for Vehicle-to-Everything systems, but naively transmitting full-resolution frames from edge to cloud causes severe communication overhead and high cloud-side prefill latency. We present CABLE, a cloud-assisted bandwidth-efficient LMM-based encoding framework for edge-cloud perception. CABLE propagates the previous cloud segmentation mask on the edge using ego-motion compensation, refines it with residual-motion cues, and consolidates disconnected regions via a corridor envelope to form a robust region of interest (ROI). Only ROI-masked images are uploaded, while the cloud segmentation output is fed back as the prior for the next frame, forming a mask-to-ROI-to-LMM feedback loop. Experiments on five datasets (nuScenes, WOD-ZB, Waymo, KITTI, and CADC) show consistent communication savings while largely preserving perception, achieving -- ROI pixel-coverage reduction with -- estimated LMM prefill speedup at a modest detection-quality trade-off relative to full-frame inference.
Multi-Agent Embodied Autonomous Driving: From V2X Information Exchange to Shared World Models
Autonomous driving is shifting from isolated vehicle intelligence toward multi-agent embodied systems that share perception, infer intent, and coordinate action under uncertainty. This survey examines this transition through the lens of Shared World Models (SWMs): predictive cross-agent representations maintained across vehicles, infrastructure, and other traffic participants. We review more than 380 publications spanning vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, collaborative perception, inter-agent cognition, cooperative planning, end-to-end cooperative driving, and simulation and data engines for closed-loop validation. The organizing question is how exchanged observations become aligned state, intent-aware interaction, and coordinated downstream action. Across the surveyed literature, evaluation remains concentrated in simulation, curated benchmarks, and offline protocols. Foundation-model-based coordination also lacks verified real-time safety guarantees in open traffic. These gaps motivate key research priorities for multi-agent embodied autonomous driving (MAEAD): verifiable shared-state maintenance, robust intent and plan alignment, and safe coordinated action under communication, latency, and deployment constraints.
REACH: Interpretability-Driven Feature Identification and Architecture Compression for Multi-Channel Vehicular Channel Estimation
Multi-channel mixed-SNR training improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation of deep learning channel estimators for IEEE 802.11p vehicular communications, yet the internal mechanism responsible for this remains unexplained. This work presents REACH (Relevance-based Explanation and Architectural Compression for cHannel estimators), a gradient-based interpretability framework that operates at two levels. Input-level attribution identifies a subset of time-frequency features consistently relevant across all evaluated channel conditions, enabling input dimensionality reduction with minimal performance loss. Filter-level attribution reveals a near-universal internal representation, providing a representational account of the observed OOD generalisation. Guided by the resulting filter taxonomy, relevance-guided architecture compression substantially reduces both the number of parameters and the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) with sub-1 dB normalised mean square error (NMSE) degradation, and OOD generalisation degrades more slowly than within-distribution accuracy under increasing compression.
X-Band UAV-enabled Integrated Sensing and Communications for Vehicular Networks
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly considered as aerial platforms capable of providing both sensing and communication services, representing a promising paradigm for intelligent transportation systems. This paper investigates the optimal time allocation for a UAV-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISaC) system operating in the X-band for vehicular networks. We analyze the trade-off between sensing accuracy and communication performance under practical UAV constraints and fading effects, considering both single-shadowing and double-shadowing channel models. An optimization framework is developed to allocate time between sensing and communication while guaranteeing minimum communication rates and sufficient sensing reliability. Simulation results demonstrate adaptive time allocation strategies, highlighting how UAV-to-ground channel conditions and target distances influence the balance between sensing and communication in smart mobility scenarios.
CADET: A Modular Platform for Evaluating Distributed Cooperative Autonomy in Connected Autonomous Vehicles
Deep learning models are increasingly central to autonomous vehicle (AV) pipelines, yet their integration has traditionally followed a monolithic design where perception, planning, and control execute on a single onboard computer. This design overlooks the emerging paradigm of cooperative autonomy, where vehicles interact with roadside units (RSUs), edge servers, and cloud-hosted intelligence through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity. Cooperative perception and control improve safety and efficiency, but also introduce systems-level challenges: network latency, compute heterogeneity, and multi-tenant contention, all critically affect real-time decision-making. These challenges are further amplified by the increasing reliance on large foundation models, whose scale necessitates cloud deployment. We present CADET (Cooperative Autonomy through Distributed Experimentation Toolkit), a modular platform for systematic and reproducible evaluation of distributed cooperative autonomy systems under realistic deployment conditions. CADET decouples the AV stack into composable modules that can be flexibly deployed across vehicles, infrastructure, and edge/cloud tiers. The framework integrates state-of-the-art models, incorporates trace-driven network and workload emulation, and provides synchronized model-, system-, and task-level instrumentation. Through V2V and V2I experiments, we show that distributed deployment choices fundamentally shape safety, with V2V intent packets outperforming cloud-based perception and RSU-assisted perception sustaining safety until overloaded by concurrent requests. Although designed for AV pipelines, CADET also supports dataset-driven experimentation, enabling systems and ML researchers to benchmark distributed inference workloads independently of full vehicle simulation. CADET is open source, with code and demo available at https://nesl.github.io/cadet-web.
Network Optimization Aspects of Autonomous Vehicles: Challenges and Future Directions
Global megatrends, such as urbanization, population growth, and emerging network solutions are accelerating the development of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) industry. There are many truths, some misconceptions, and even some excitement about CAVs in the public's opinion. The main objective of the current article is to provide a comprehensive review, eliminate misconceptions, and outline the future of the network optimization aspects of autonomous vehicles by presenting various multidisciplinary methods, such as cooperative perception. Given our extensive experience with CAVs, we are aiming to share some of the insights and knowledge we have gained, along with relevant use-cases and experiment results.