Towards inter-vehicle communication strategies for platooning support

Platooning, the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potentials to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block - it is needed to manage and to maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in terms of update frequency and reliability must be met. We developed communication strategies by explicitly taking into account the requirements of the controller, exploiting synchronized communication slots as well as transmit power adaptation. The proposed approaches are compared to two state of the art adaptive beaconing protocols that have been designed for generic message dissemination. Our simulation models have been parametrized and validated by means of real-world experiments. We clearly show how taking into account specific requirements can be extremely beneficial even in very crowded freeway scenarios.