A Fast Simulation Approach to Assess the Influence of Bluetooth Communication on Distance Control between Vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of assessing the effect of communication delays on the control performance of a platoon of two vehicles. We consider Bluetooth communication and develop a simple stochastic model for the Bluetooth delay distribution. It is shown that due to the long tails of this distribution, the computation time of a Monte Carlo approach would be prohibitive when assessing the effect of long communication delays on the control performance. Hence, we propose a novel and fast simulation approach that is computationally more efficient than pure Monte Carlo simulations. Simulations on a platoon of two vehicles illustrate the effectiveness of the approach for assessing average and worst case performance or for approximating the probability density function of the control performance.