Emergency Braking in Platooning with Communication Loss

Abstract

Platooning is an application of autonomous driving in which the vehicles travel linearly following each other. The benefits of such driving are many-fold, primarily it increases the traffic throughput and also reduces fuel consumption as the result of minimized drag experienced by the vehicles. The state-of-the-art technologies to achieve platooning involve vehicle-to-vehicle communication for receiving all the events instantaneously. However, wireless channels being prone to communication losses pose risks to the platoon operation. Therefore, it is important to study how platoons operate under communication losses. Platoons being vehicular ad-hoc networks, the information dissemination is governed by Time Division Multiple Access policies known as Information Flow Topology (IFT). Platooning being sensitive to communication losses, during an emergency braking, the requirements are even more stringent as it could lead to rear-end collisions within the vehicles.

All the performance evaluation are done on a newly designed testbed which is both cost-effective and customizable. Several kinds of IFTs have been developed in recent years. We consider four of the predominant ones and evaluate their performance during emergency braking with temporary communication loss. Since the decrease in inter-vehicle distances is the main reason for vehicle collisions during platoon, we use it as a key performance indicator when evaluating the performance. To improve the reliability of communication in the platoon, we propose to adopt an existing methodology in wireless networking and combine it with the IFTs in platooning. We additionally show the improvement in the collision probability with this method. We conclude our work with limitations and further improvements.