Smart autonomous vehicles can cooperatively drive as platoons offering benefits like enhanced safety, traffic efficiency, and fuel conservation. While traditionally platoons have followed a single-lane, train-like structure they face challenges when scaling that include communication range limitations and lane-change difficulties. In this article, we propose a new paradigm of multi-lane platoons that spreads platoons across multiple lanes. We explore the characteristics of multi-lane platoons particularly focusing on communication parameters. Additionally, we propose a cross-layer mechanism to seamlessly integrate this concept within the existing communication standard, ETSI. Our work significantly enhances platoon communication performance in mixed traffic scenarios and we propose optimizations to improve its effectiveness.

The pioneering field of tactile Internet (TI) will enable the transfer of human skills over long distances through haptic feedback. Realizing this demands a roundtrip latency of sub-5 ms. In this work, we investigate the capability of Wi-Fi 6 and existing TI scheduling/multiplexing schemes in meeting this stringent latency constraint. Taking the concrete example of the state-of-the-art video-haptic multiplexer (VH-multiplexer), we highlight the pitfalls of relying on the existing Wi-Fi 6 systems for TI communication. To circumvent this, we propose video-tactile latency scheduler (ViTaLS) - a novel link layer framework for tuning the video-tactile frame transmissions to suit their heterogeneous Quality of Service requirements. We present a mathematical model to characterize the packet transmission duration of ViTaLS. Using a custom simulator, we validate our model and measure the objective performance improvement of ViTaLS over VH-multiplexer. We also present ViTaLS-optimal - a variant of ViTaLS, for further 4 reducing the tactile latency. Objectively, we show that ViTaLS-optimal yields a latency improvement of up to 82 %. Based on experiments conducted on a real TI testbed, we subjectively demonstrate that ViTaLS-optimal outperforms the VH-multiplexer.