Impact of Data Compression on Downstream AI Tasks: A Study using Teleoperated Driving over 5G

Teleoperation, such as remote driving, is considered as a key use case of 5G and Next-Generation (NextG) networks. In this context, robots, autonomous vehicles, or other autonomous agents transmit sensor data over mobile networks to edge or cloud servers, where AI systems collaborate with human operators to provide situational awareness and enable remote control. In the case of teleoperated driving, vehicles are equipped with an array of cameras and LiDAR devices, which can generate 100s Mbps (megabits per second) of data. As shown in existing measurement studies, such data volumes far exceed the uplink capacity of currently deployed 5G networks, especially when multiple vehicles compete for radio resources. Data compression is thus imperative. In this paper, we explore the impact of sensor data compression on the performance of downstream AI tasks running in edge/cloud servers, which are crucial to alert human operators for safe teleoperation. Using object recognition and semantic segmentation as two example AI tasks, we study how data compression affects the performance of these two AI tasks using unimodal (video or LiDAR) and multimodal (video+LiDAR) data. We find that lossy data compression generally decreases the performance of AI tasks. The performances of these AI tasks exhibit differing degrees of sensitivity based on the types of data sources and levels of compression. We also empirically identify an optimal tradeoff point for the multimodal vision tasks.