Adaptation of ETSI DCC for multi-lane platoon scenario

Abstract

Platooning involves organizing a group of vehicles with common attributes into a formation. With the help of Road Side Units, they establish Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). To facilitate communication in this system, one of the prominent communication technologies is Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). In Europe, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) standardizes DSRC as ETSI ITS-G5 in which Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) is used to prevent and control congestion within a wireless channel. In this work, we determine a list of issues, namely traffic inefficiency and impaired communication, with the conventional formation of a platoon, especially an elongated one. Then, a new paradigm of multi-lane platoons is proposed with a list of modifications based on ETSI DCC to establish a prioritization scheme. These modifications are tailored to the characteristics and regulations of a multi-lane platoon. We also point out the issues of the current adaptive DCC parameters, which motivates us to develop a cross-layer mechanism called dynamic β. This proposal aims to improve the performance of the congestion control mechanism. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of preventing channel congestion by reducing the channel load by 22% at the highest message intensity without compromising the performance of each vehicle. For dynamic β, we manifest a higher channel utilization when employing our proposal, compared to what is achieved with the default ETSI parameters. Message delivery ratio, node capacity, periodicity, and message age are also greatly improved. In short, our work provides safer for more efficient traffic.