L-Platooning: A Protocol for Managing a Long Platoon With DSRC

Won, Myounggyu · 2021 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1109/tits.2021.3057956

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Summary

This paper addresses the limitation of existing vehicle platooning protocols, which fail to support "long" platoons consisting of many heavy-duty trucks due to the restricted range of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies like DSRC. The authors demonstrate that as inter-vehicle distance increases, the packet delivery rate (PDR) drops significantly, causing trailing vehicles to lose connection with the platoon leader. This loss of connectivity prevents trailing vehicles from receiving critical kinematic data, leading to instability and an inability to maintain precise inter-vehicle distances. To solve this, the authors propose L-Platooning, a protocol designed to enable the seamless, reliable, and rapid formation of long platoons. The proposed solution introduces the concept of a "Virtual Leader," a platoon member designated to act as an intermediate leader for vehicles out of range of the original leader. The protocol utilizes a Virtual Leader Quality Index (VLQI) to select optimal virtual leaders based on their connectivity to both the original leader and their followers. L-Platooning divides a long platoon into smaller, manageable sub-platoons, allowing trailing vehicles to receive timely control data from their local virtual leader rather than relying on high-latency multi-hop relaying. The system also includes novel mechanisms for handling vehicle join and leave maneuvers specifically adapted for long platoons. The authors evaluate L-Platooning using extensive simulations with the Veins network simulator and SUMO traffic simulator. They modeled a platoon of 30 trailer trucks with 20-meter inter-vehicle gaps. Results showed that without L-Platooning, PDR dropped to near zero for vehicles beyond the 10th position, causing significant speed deviations and control errors. In contrast, L-Platooning maintained high connectivity and stability throughout the platoon. The protocol allowed vehicles to maintain the desired inter-vehicle distance with a mean error of only 6 cm. Additionally, the simulations confirmed that L-Platooning effectively manages dynamic changes in platoon composition, such as vehicles joining or leaving, without disrupting the stability of the long formation. The significance of this work lies in providing the first working protocol capable of managing long platoons under dynamic network conditions limited by V2V range. By overcoming the communication bottleneck, L-Platooning enables the practical deployment of large-scale truck platooning, which offers substantial benefits in fuel efficiency, reduced CO2 emissions, and increased road capacity. The protocol is designed to be integrated with existing lower-level controllers, making it a viable solution for logistics companies seeking to utilize heavy-duty truck platooning for cost savings and environmental sustainability.

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