Integrated Control and Communication for Vehicle Platoons Based on Visible Light Communications: A Heterogeneous Age of Information Perspective

In this paper, a novel integrated control and communication (ICC) framework is proposed for vehicle platoons, ensuring platoon stability while optimizing energy consumption for communications. To address the high signaling overhead and long delays caused by multi-link competition in radio-frequency-based vehicle-to-vehicle communications, visible light communications (VLCs) are employed, allowing adjacent vehicles to establish collision-free links and simultaneously transmit motion status information (MSI) for platoon control. Besides, age of information (AoI) is utilized to quantify the heterogeneous timeliness of the MSI. Building upon this, a distributed linear control strategy is designed for vehicle platoons with a multi-predecessor-leader-multi-following information topology (IT) and heterogeneous AoIs. Afterward, through stability analysis, the maximum allowable AoI threshold is obtained to guarantee both internal stability and input-state string stability under external disturbances. Accordingly, taking the AoI threshold as a constraint, a long-term energy minimization problem is further formulated to optimize the energy consumed by multi-source, multi-hop, and multicast intra-platoon VLC while maintaining platoon stability. To solve this problem, an online distributed information scheduling policy based on Lyapunov optimization is proposed. Finally, simulation results reveal that the proposed ICC framework effectively maintains platoon stability across various ITs, while significantly reducing the energy consumption for communications to no more than 40% of that achieved by multiple baselines, thus highlighting its substantial potential in vehicle platoons.