  In a fully autonomous driving framework, where vehicles operate without human
intervention, information sharing plays a fundamental role. In this context,
new network solutions have to be designed to handle the large volumes of data
generated by the rich sensor suite of the cars in a reliable and efficient way.
Among all the possible sensors, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) can produce
an accurate 3D point cloud representation of the surrounding environment, which
in turn generates high data rates. For this reason, efficient point cloud
compression is paramount to alleviate the burden of data transmission over
bandwidth-constrained channels and to facilitate real-time communications. In
this paper, we propose a pipeline to efficiently compress LiDAR observations in
an automotive scenario. First, we leverage the capabilities of RangeNet++, a
Deep Neural Network (DNN) used to semantically infer point labels, to reduce
the channel load by selecting the most valuable environmental data to be
disseminated. Second, we compress the selected points using Draco, a 3D
compression algorithm which is able to obtain compression up to the
quantization error. Our experiments, validated on the Semantic KITTI dataset,
demonstrate that it is possible to compress and send the information at the
frame rate of the LiDAR, thus achieving real-time performance.
