NR-V2X for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

The introduction of vehicular communications has long been advocated as compelling to guarantee the safety and stability of platooning, owing to the information that vehicles exchange through the wireless channel. However, connecting the vehicles through radio links introduces delays and persistent packet losses that may compromise the proper platoon functioning. To investigate this issue, the present work replicates through simulation the vehicle dynamics of a Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control platoon and the transmission impairments that affect the platoon communications, when the 5G New Radio standard for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications is adopted. The study first characterizes the actual behavior of the platoon when simultaneously struck by a perturbation in the leader’s acceleration and a severe communication outage. In the worst examined setting, it shows that the radio technology is robust enough to guarantee platoon stability. It further demonstrates that a proper selection of the packet scheduling strategy allows to reduce the time gap between consecutive vehicles while still maintaining platoon stability, at the expense of a moderate increase in energy expenditure.