Performance Analysis of Vehicle Platooning Using a Cellular Network

This paper investigates the performance of longitudinal control of a platoon of vehicles using communication of messages through a cellular network. We describe a platooning algorithm that utilizes, at each following vehicle, information communicated by the preceding vehicle and the lead vehicle of the platoon. The information received from the lead vehicle includes the position, speed and acceleration of the lead vehicle, whereas the information received from the preceding vehicle includes the target acceleration the preceding vehicle is attempting to achieve. The information is transmitted in messages that are received by a cellular base station, which then retransmits the messages to the intended vehicles. We perform an analysis of communication system capacity for a highway setting with dense configurations of platoons. We show that (a) the additional latency due to transmission through the infrastructure does not impact platooning performance, and (b) LTE can even support extreme vehicle densities with no impact to platooning.