Characterization of Intra-Platoon V2V Links in Long Homogeneous Platoons

Vehicular platooning aims to improve fuel efficiency and traffic fluidity, and wireless protocols can support such goals. Platoons benefit all vehicle classes (e.g., passenger, truck, trailer), and can be made arbitrarily long, to the extent control and networking mechanisms allow. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) wireless links inside the platoon are susceptible to path loss, shadowing & diffraction by vehicular obstacles, and fading. In this paper we characterize V2V intra-platoon links at the physical and data-link levels, for platoons composed of same-class vehicles. Our simulation results, using a 30 vehicle-long platoon, show that vehicle dimensions affect propagation and link-level performance, notably that Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) for edge nodes in an all-passenger vehicle scenario can be 3 times higher than for an all-trailer scenario.