An Efficient Message Dissemination Technique in Platooning Applications

Autonomous driving in road trains, a.k.a. platooning, may reduce fuel consumption considerably if the inter-vehicle distances are kept short. However, to do this, the intra-platoon communication must not only be reliable but also able to meet strict deadlines. While time-triggered messages are the foundation of most distributed control applications, platooning is likely to also require dissemination of event-driven messages. While much research work has focused on minimizing the age of periodic messages, state-of-the-art for disseminating event-driven messages is to let all nodes repeat all messages and focus on mitigating broadcast storms. We derive an efficient message dissemination scheme based on relay selection which minimizes the probability of error at the intended receiver(s) for both unicast and broadcast, without degrading the performance of co-existing time-triggered messages. We present a full analysis of the resulting error probability and delay, when relayers, selected by our algorithm, are used to disseminate messages within a platoon. Numerical results indicate that the proposed relaying policy significantly enhances the reliability for a given delay.