High-Reliability and Low-Energy Sensor Sharing in Vehicle Platoon Based on Multihop Millimeter-Wave Communication

Abstract

Sensor sharing is an important ability for vehicle platoon to reduce vehicle costs and improve driving safety. However, sensing data with a large amount of information is difficult to be shared by using traditional communication methods. Applying millimeter-wave communication can improve sensor sharing capabilities of vehicles, but millimeter wave has large propagation loss and is easy to be blocked by obstacles. Therefore, how to apply millimeter-wave communication to improve sensor sharing capabilities in vehicle platoon is still an open issue. To this end, we present a stochastic game approach and propose two distributed algorithms to achieve high-reliability and low-energy sensor sharing. First, we model the multihop millimeter-wave sensor sharing of the vehicle platoon as an optimization problem of reducing energy consumption while ensuring communication reliability, and then based on the characteristics of vehicle communication, we transform the optimization problem into a multiagent stochastic game. Second, by utilizing the characteristic that the immediate cost has nothing to do with the transfer function of the game, we prove that this stochastic game has equilibrium by proving that each subgame has a Nash equilibrium. Third, we propose an equilibrium-guided multiagent distributed (EGMD) algorithm to obtain the optimal action of each vehicle in the platoon, and then based on the analysis of the limitation of the approach, we present a multiagent distributed cooperation (MDC) algorithm to further reduce the system energy consumption. Finally, through simulation experiments, we evaluate a variety of approaches and demonstrate that our proposed methods can significantly reduce energy consumption while ensuring communication reliability.