Joint Platoon Control and Resource Allocation for NOMA-V2V Communication System

Platooning is considered as a promising technology in reducing fuel consumption, improving flow capacity to the future intelligent transportation system. Effective platoon control to maintain a stable platoon relies heavily on the vehicular communication performance. However, network resources become more limited due to the rapid growth in communication devices, and how limited network resources can be utilized to satisfy the platoon control demand becomes an emerging issue. To address this issue, in this paper, we investigate the problem of joint platoon control and resource allocation. Firstly, we model the relation between resource allocation and platoon control requirement based on the error bound and error correction ability. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is introduced to support multiple vehicular users sharing a time slot, which improves resource utilization. A distributed control policy is applied based on the state estimation. Then, we propose an optimization problem to minimize total power consumption with control-related communication requirements and a two-staged algorithm to solve it. In the first stage, user scheduling is performed according to platoon control demands. With user scheduling determined, power allocation problem is directly solved in the second stage based on the NOMA decoding order. Finally, the result of experiments demonstrates that our proposed method is efficient in utilizing network resources to achieve effective platoon control.