Probabilistic Communication In Car Platoons

Autonomously driving vehicles appeared on the canvas of science in the middle of the twentieth century and have since then been the subject of many generations of researchers. One application of autonomous driving is platooning, where cars autonomously follow each other in very close distance. This application is motivated by fuel savings, labor decrease, increase in road capacity and higher safety. To achieve platooning capability, vehicles require sensors, intelligent processing systems, and communication devices. This paper provides a study in which cars communicate to measure the system performance in terms of successful message transmission probability, also referred to as the integrity of wireless communication. The communication is one crucial part of the chain of the safety functionality of an orchestrated braking maneuver in a platoon, located between the car initiating the braking and all other members of the platoon. The numerical results target the influence of parameters like transmission power, channel gain, interference noise, and total number of involved vehicles.