Design and Implementation of a Raft based Wireless Consensus System for Autonomous Driving

Although the interconnection of all things based on 5G and AI has become an incremental trend in all walks of life, its centralized design has many challenges and drawbacks when applied to industrial and life scenarios. In the field of autonomous driving (a.k.a., auto-driving), the centralized vehicle-to-everything (V2X) system depends heavily on the stability of the central node, and there is seldom a mechanism to guarantee the security, stability and timeliness of information in highly dynamic auto-driving scenarios. In this paper, we first design and implement the AIR-RAFT system that supports wireless distributed consensus for IoT. AIR-RAFT is a complete embedded system based on the Raft consensus algorithm and can be potentially installed on auto-driving vehicles. It can not only achieve wireless consensus to ensure the consistency and security of V2X data but also can synchronize the actions among the vehicles in a distributed manner though all cars are not trusted each other. In addition, we originally propose the 'selective edge decision layer' for the AIR-RAFT system which can share part of the decision privilege in auto-driving cars. In practical performance evaluations, the AIR-RAFT based auto-driving vehicles stably achieve multi-node (3-7) wireless data consensus and actions synchronization that maintain good working stability within 350 m centered on the leader.