Towards Communication Strategies for Platooning

Platooning, the act of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potentials to improve traffic flow efficiency and driving experience on freeways, and most importantly road traffic safety. The challenges of this application are numerous, as witnessed by the number of projects working on this topic from the eighties till nowadays. Platooning indeed encompasses control theory, vehicle dynamics, transportation engineering, and wireless networking, making it one of the widest and most challenging research topics. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block for this application, as it is needed to manage and maintain the platoons and, clearly, have strict constraints in terms of update frequency and reliability. While control theory and vehicle dynamics already provide strong theoretical and practical basis, questions regarding robust and timely communication are still open. In this paper we study concepts for platooning systems and identify specific challenges in wireless networking. In particular, we present a platooning simulation framework that can be used to analyze such systems, describe approaches for communication protocols, and present preliminary results outlining the potentials of our ideas.