A Joint Design of Platoon Communication and Control Based on LTE-V2V

Recently, vehicle platooning has attracted a lot of attention as one of the promising solutions to the explosion of vehicle numbers. By exchanging information among vehicles through communication networks, vehicle platooning can significantly improve traffic safety and efficiency. In this paper, we develop a joint systematic design of platoon communication and control to reduce position errors of consecutive vehicles and to improve platoon safety. Through separate information dissemination of the platoon leader and followers, we improve the success probability of the platoon leader's information dissemination. To extend the communication range of the platoon leader and also the platoon scale, we propose to use relays to forward the platoon leader's messages. Further, an adaptive distributed model predictive control (DMPC) based controller is presented, which can adjust its control parameters according to platoon state and dynamic information sources. Simulation results not only verify the proposed systematic design in terms of position errors, but also show that our scheme performs well in vehicle failure cases where collisions can be avoided and platoon safety improved.