Toward Communication Strategies for Platooning: Simulative and Experimental Evaluation

Platooning, which is the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potential to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block: It is needed to manage and maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in terms of update frequency and communication reliability must be met. We investigate different communication strategies by explicitly taking into account the requirements of the controller, exploiting synchronized communication slots, and transmit power adaptation. As a baseline, we compared the proposed approaches to two state-of-the-art adaptive beaconing protocols that have been designed for cooperative awareness applications, namely, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) and Dynamic Beaconing (DynB). Our simulation models have been parameterized and validated by means of real-world experiments. Our results demonstrate that the combination of synchronized communication slots with transmit power adaptation is perfectly suited for cooperative driving applications, even on very crowded freeway scenarios.