NR-V2X for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Abstract

The introduction of vehicular communications has long been advocated as a compelling tool to improve platooning safety and stability performances. However, wirelessly linking the vehicles opens up a set of potential shortcomings including vulnerability to cyber-attacks and communication breakdowns. This manuscript introduces a simulation module that replicates the communication dynamics and the transmission impairments in a homogeneous Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control platoon of vehicles. A stand-out feature of the work is the message broadcasting latency characterization based on the actual conflicts in accessing the radio channel, in an attempt to move beyond the fixed-latency assumption. In a realistic communication environment, the cooperative scheme proved to be feasible: the platoon achieves weak string stability even when simultancously affected by severe communication outages and significant traffic perturbations. The paper further elaborates on the possibility of lowering the time-gap policy and the vehicles’ energy expenditure when leveraging radio communications to transmit information.