Platoon multicast: TDMA-like scheduling based multicast protocol for vehicle platoon system

Abstract

Vehicle platooning is one way to implement an automated driving based on inter-vehicle communication and aims to increase capacity of roads, fuel efficiency, driving convenience and safety through automated maintenance of the shortest inter-vehicle distances at high-speed. Because of mobility and density of vehicles, it is necessary to use control messages frequently and it leads to communication congestion in a vehicle platoon. Therefore, it is essential, to manage vehicles dynamically and to communicate based on predictable mechanism among platooning grouped vehicles. Although most of the existing vehicle platooning experiments usually focused on fixed platoon identification rather than controlling the platoon dynamically, recently a bloom-filter based method to realize dynamic vehicle platoon identification and management has been proposed in a previous study called Filter Multicast. In this study, we present a platoon-multicast protocol enhancing Filter Multicast method with dynamic time-slot allocation scheme to solve the abovementioned problems. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol and validate the effectiveness of the proposal by simulation, compared with an 802.11p and Filter Multicast protocol.