A platoon driving scheme based on vehicular cloud computing technology

Abstract

Improvement of driving safety and increasing road capacity is one of the most important aspects of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The platoon of autonomous vehicles is one of the ITS applications used to decrease the congestions and accidents on the roads. In addition, forming the vehicles in the platoon can decrease fuel consumption and provides passengers with more comfortable trips. This paper proposes a new scheme to improve platoon driving using Vehicular Cloud Computing concepts. The scheme improves the communication technology of the platoon according to Dedicated Shorted Range Communication (DSRC) protocol by broadcasting the safety message via Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V). Furthermore; the vehicles exchange the data with the Road Side Unit (RSU) through the vehicle to Infrastructure V2I. The stability of the platoon which is the major problem of platoon driving is achieved through using the cloud computing capability in the RSU. This capability is satisfying through the connection between the leader vehicle and RSU to keep the distance stable among platoon members. The performance of the proposed scheme was evaluated using several parameters such as; End-to-End (E2E) delay, response time, and throughput. The VANET mobility simulation (VANET MOBISIM) mobility is used to generate a real map with the Manhattan grid model. The proposed scheme proves its efficiency by increasing the vehicle density in the roads and by adjusting the DSRC modulation. The Simulation results showed improvements as compared to the existing schemes.