Abstract

Vehicle platoons will play an important role in improving on-road safety in tomorrow’s smart cities. Vehicles in a platoon can exploit vehicle- to-vehicle (V2V) communications to collect information, such as velocity and acceleration, from surrounding vehicles so as to coordinate their operations and maintain the target velocity and inter-vehicle distance required by the platoon. However, due to the interference and uncertainty of the wireless channel, V2V communications within a platoon will experience a wireless transmission delay which can impair the vehicles’ ability to stabilize their speed and distances within their platoon. In this paper, the problem of integrated communication and control is studied for wireless-connected platoons. In particular, a novel approach is proposed for optimizing a platoon’s stability while taking into account, jointly, the state of the wireless V2V network and the stability of the platoon’s control system. Based on the proposed integrated communication and control strategy, the plant and string stability for the platoon are analyzed. The signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) threshold, which will prevent the instability of the control system, is also determined. Moreover, the reliability of the wireless system, defined as the probability that the wireless system meets the control system’s delay needs, is derived. Simulation results shed light on the benefits of the proposed approach and the synergies between the wireless network and the platoon’s control system.