Field Evaluation of Adaptive Path Selection for Platoon-Based V2N Communications

Abstract

Vehicles on the road are expected to connect continuously to the Internet at sufficiently high speeds, e.g., several Mbps or higher, to support multimedia applications. However, even when passing through a well-facilitated city area, Internet access can be unreliable and even disconnected if the travel speed is high. We therefore propose a network path selection technique to meet network throughput requirements. The proposed technique is based on the attractor selection model and enables vehicles to switch the path from a route connecting directly to a cellular network to a relay type through neighboring vehicles for Internet access. We also develop a mechanism that prevents frequent path switching when the performance of all available paths does not meet the requirements. We conduct field evaluations by platooning two vehicles in a real-world driving environment and confirm that the proposed technique maintains the required throughput of up to 7 Mbps on average. We also evaluated our proposed technique by extensive computer simulations of up to 6 vehicles in a platoon. The results show that increasing platoon length yields a greater improvement in throughput, and the mechanism we developed decreases the rate of path switching by up to 25%.