Trusted and Collaborative Data Sharing with Quality Awareness in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are coming with great potentials to bring safer, greener, and more convenient transportation systems. As AVs rely on radar, camera, and other advanced sensors to sense its surroundings, a salient challenge of AVs is the intrinsic limitations of onboard sensors (e.g., limited awareness range, blind spots, and failure in foggy days). To tackle this problem, we propose a collaborative data sharing scheme for AVs to make up for sensor deficiencies by promoting sensory information sharing in autonomous driving. However, this brings another fundamental issue on how to ensure trust in shared sensory data from distrustful collaborators and how to motivate AVs to participate in data sharing. This work studies this issue by modeling it as a quality-aware optimal sensing task scheduling problem. Specifically, we design an edge computing-enabled architecture where AVs can form collaborative sensing groups in executing sensing tasks. After that, a quality-aware auction-based incentive mechanism is developed to promote AVs’ participation and high-quality data sharing. We also design a reputation model to recruit trustworthy AVs to perform sensing tasks based on their behaviors and social identities. Due to the NP-hardness of problem, we devise a heuristic algorithm to determine the optimal winners and payments in auction with truthfulness and individual rationality guarantees. Lastly, extensive simulations validate that our approach can effectively improve sensing data quality and user utility, compared with conventional schemes.