🤖 AI Summary
Existing testbeds for autonomous driving video uplink struggle to simultaneously achieve realism, repeatability, and practicality: real-vehicle platforms incur high costs and face challenges in reproducing consistent network conditions, while simulation-based approaches lack authentic end-to-end dynamics. To address this gap, this work proposes a trajectory-driven, cloud-native cellular network emulation testbed that, for the first time, integrates time-synchronized replay of vehicular and network traces with a cloud-native architecture. Implemented on commodity Linux virtual nodes, the system enables route-aware, high-fidelity video uplink experiments. It supports production-grade video protocol stacks and offers low cost, scalability, repeatability, and controlled comparative experimentation—significantly enhancing the practicality and reproducibility of vehicular communication testing.
📝 Abstract
We present CloudEmu, a trace-driven, cloud-native cellular-emulation testbed for vehicle video uplink communication. Reliable, low-latency video uplink over cellular networks is essential for remote monitoring of autonomous vehicles. However, existing testbeds fall into two extremes. Physical-vehicle platforms provide realism but are costly and make validation under identical network conditions difficult, whereas simulations are inexpensive and reproducible but generally cannot replay field-measured end-to-end performance dynamics without substantial calibration or readily run production video-uplink stacks. A software-defined, cloud-native emulation approach can combine the fidelity of trace-driven replay with the agility and scalability that network softwarization principles offer. To this end, we propose CloudEmu that replays time-synchronized cellular and position traces, collected once from vehicles, on commodity Linux-based virtual vehicle and video-receiver nodes. A Linux-based emulation framework couples traffic replay with position replay, tying network dynamics to each point along the route and enabling repeatable, route-aware experiments without repeated on-road trials. Our demo deploys a production-grade video-uplink stack on CloudEmu, allowing attendees to experience low-cost, repeatable trials and controlled comparisons under identical replayed network conditions.