English

Birdcast: Interest-aware BEV Multicasting for Infrastructure-assisted Collaborative Perception

Networking and Internet Architecture 2026-04-02 v1

Abstract

Vehicle-to-infrastructure collaborative perception (V2I-CP) leverages a high-vantage node to transmit supplementary information, i.e., bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature maps, to vehicles, effectively overcoming line-of-sight limitations. However, the downlink V2I transmission introduces a significant communication bottleneck. Moreover, vehicles in V2I-CP require \textit{heterogeneous yet overlapping} information tailored to their unique occlusions and locations, rendering standard unicast/broadcast protocols inefficient. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{Birdcast}, a novel multicasting framework for V2I-CP. By accounting for individual maps of interest, we formulate a joint feature selection and multicast grouping problem to maximize network-wide utility under communication constraints. Since this formulation is a mixed-integer nonlinear program and is NP-hard, we develop an accelerated greedy algorithm with a theoretical (11/e)(1 - 1/\sqrt{e}) approximation guarantee. While motivated by CP, Birdcast provides a general framework applicable to a wide range of multicasting systems where users possess heterogeneous interests and varying channel conditions. Extensive simulations on the V2X-Sim dataset demonstrate that Birdcast significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both system utility and perception quality, achieving up to 27\% improvement in total utility and a 3.2\% increase in mean average precision (mAP).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.00701,
  title  = {Birdcast: Interest-aware BEV Multicasting for Infrastructure-assisted Collaborative Perception},
  author = {Yanan Ma and Zhengru Fang and Yihang Tao and Yu Guo and Yiqin Deng and Xianhao Chen and Yuguang Fang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00701},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:47:57.828Z