Joint Routing and Scheduling for In-Vehicle Networks: A Deterministic Perspective

Deterministic transmission refers to the guaranteed delivery of data to its destination within a specific time frame along an optimal route, making it an indispensable prerequisite for the operation of autonomous vehicles. The in-vehicle networks (IVNs) face significant challenges in the deterministic transmission of large volumes of perception and control data from and to various vehicle components. In this paper, the cooperative scheduling and routing problem among multi-area control units (ACUs) in IVN is discussed from the view of deterministic transmission, and a ResVmix method is proposed to find the optimal two-layer assignment with ACU cooperation. The multi-cycle queuing and forwarding (multi-CQF) mechanism is employed to schedule the perceived data according to different quality of service (QoS) requirements. The cooperation among multiple ACUs enables deterministic routing of data. The two-layer optimization problems on multi-CQF and ACU are formulated as a+ decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDP) and solved using the enhanced multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) method. Simulation results demonstrate that ResVmix significantly enhances the deterministic transmission performance of IVN. Compared to traditional shortest path algorithms and state-of-the-art MADRL methods, ResVmix achieves a 22.4% increase in arrival rate and a 20.1% increase in confirmed arrivals, respectively.