B-AWARE: Blockage Aware RSU Scheduling for 5G Enabled Autonomous Vehicles

5G Millimeter Wave (mmWave) technology holds great promise for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) due to its ability to achieve data rates in the Gbps range. However, mmWave suffers high beamforming overhead and requirement of line of sight (LOS) to maintain a strong connection. For Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) scenarios, where CAVs connect to roadside units (RSUs), these drawbacks become apparent. Because vehicles are dynamic, there is a large potential for link blockages, which in turn is detrimental to the connected applications running on the vehicle, such as cooperative perception and remote driver takeover. Existing RSU selection schemes base their decisions on signal strength and vehicle trajectory alone, which is not enough to prevent the blockage of links. Most recent CAVs motion planning algorithms routinely use other vehicle's near-future plans, either by explicit communication among vehicles, or by prediction. In this thesis, I make use of this knowledge (of the other vehicle's near future path plans) to further improve the RSU association mechanism for CAVs. I solve the RSU association problem by converting it to a shortest path problem with the objective to maximize the total communication bandwidth. Evaluations of B-AWARE in simulation using Simulated Urban Mobility (SUMO) and Digital twin for self-dRiving Intelligent VEhicles (DRIVE) on 12 highway and city street scenarios with varying traffic density and RSU placements show that B-AWARE results in a 1.05x improvement of the potential datarate in the average case and 1.28x in the best case vs. the state of the art. But more impressively, B-AWARE reduces the time spent with no connection by 48% in the average case and 251% in the best case as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. This is partly a result of B-AWARE reducing almost 100% of blockage occurrences in simulation.