Vehicular and Messaging Throughput Tradeoffs in Autonomous Highway Systems

Emerging autonomous vehicular technology advances facilitate the development of intelligent traffic regulation systems, aiming to configure vehicular mobility patterns to enhance in-road safety and accommodate high rate transport of vehicle-to- vehicle messaging flows. To date, mechanisms that are implemented to regulate vehicular mobility and those employed to provide for the communications of message flows across the highway, have been studied independently. In this paper, we investigate mechanisms that are used to regulate the mobility of highway vehicles, as they form distinct platoons, while also aiming to disseminate high priority safety and lower priority status messaging flows. We identify desired configurations of platoon entities, and the underlying setting of the parameters of the spatial TDMA scheduling scheme, aiming to satisfy the message delay limits required for the distribution of safety messages while providing for high throughput rates for the transport of status message flows. Under each vehicular traffic congestion regime, we demonstrate the design options that are available in determining the system´s performance behavior, trading data messaging vs. vehicular traffic throughput rates.