Platoon Stability and Safety Analysis of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control under Wireless Rician Fading Channels and Jamming Attacks

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is considered as a key enabling technology to automatically regulate the intervehicle distances in a vehicle platoon to improve traffic efficiency while maintaining safety. Although the wireless communication and physical processes in the existing CACC systems are integrated in one control framework, the coupling between wireless communication reliability and system states is not well modeled. Furthermore, the research on the impact of jamming attacks on the system stability and safety is largely open. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on the stability and safety of the platoon under the wireless Rician fading channel model and jamming attacks. The effect of Rician fading and jamming on the communication reliability is incorporated in the modeling of string dynamics such that it captures its state dependency. Time-domain definition of string stability is utilized to delineate the impact of Rician fading and jamming on the CACC system’s functionality and string stability. Attacker’s possible locations at which it can destabilize the string is further studied based on the proposed model. From the safety perspective, reachable states (i.e., inter-vehicle distances) of the CACC system under unreliable wireless fading channels and jamming attacks is studied. Safety verification is investigated by examining the inter-vehicle distance trajectories. We propose a methodology to compute the upper and lower bounds of the trajectories of inter-vehicle distances between the lead vehicle and its follower. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the system stability and safety under jamming attacks in different scenarios. We identify that channel fading can degrade the performance of the CACC system, and the platoon’s safety is highly sensitive to jamming attacks. The best location to launch the jamming attack to destabilize the platoon is above the second vehicle in the platoon. The platoon is more vulnerable to jamming attacks when the lead vehicle is decelerating.