Multi-Armed Bandit-Aided Near-Optimal Over-The-Air Updates in Multi-Band V2X Systems

As autonomous and connected vehicles continue to garner much research attention, the automotive Over-The-Air (OTA) updates recently emerged as an important research topic. OTA is crucial to disseminate critical updates for safety and stability of on-board sensing and operational systems. In beyond 5G(BSG) systems, OTA may be regarded as cached and a service provided by cellular base stations and roadside units (RSUs). However, for large-size OTA dissemination, the Electronic Control Units (ECUs) of vehicles need to download scheduled segments of the OTA payload from the serving RSU in an opportunistic manner, i.e., while stopping at the traffic signal or waiting in traffic. To maximize the downloadable payload per vehicle served by a RSU within a limited time window, we consider multi-band RSUs and ECUs as transmitting and receiving nodes, respectively. We consider legacy RF (radio frequency), mmWave (millimeter Wave), and visible light communication (VLC) bands at the RSU to provide large capacity links to the ECUs, respectively. However, the sub-channels of these frequency bands suffer from different blockage characteristics. We formulate this as a tradeoff problem in this paper in the presence of vehicular blockers, and propose a Thompson Sampling (TS)-based opportunistic band selection to alleviate the computational burden on both the communicating RSU and ECU nodes. Based on extensive computer-based simulations, we demonstrate the performance of our proposal in contrast with an optimal (centralized) baseline, as well as other comparable heuristic-based solutions.