Impact of radio channel characteristics on the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in critical car-following situations

Abstract

Truck platooning is an application of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) which relies on vehicle-to-vehicle communications facilitated by vehicle ad-hoc networks. Communication uncertainties can affect the performance of a CACC controller. Previous research has not considered the full spectrum of possible car-following scenarios needed to understand how the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons would be affected by changes in the communication network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of radio channel parameters on the string stability and collision avoidance capabilities of a CACC controller governing the longitudinal behaviour of truck platoons in a majority of critical car-following situations. We develop and use a novel, sophisticated and open-source VANET simulator OTS-Artery, which brings microscopic traffic simulation, network simulation, and psychological concepts in a single environment, for our investigations. Our results indicate that string stability and safety of truck platoons are mostly affected in car-following situations where truck platoons accelerate from the standstill to the maximum speed and decelerate from the maximum speed down to the standstill. The findings suggest that string stability can be improved by increasing transmission power and lowering receiver sensitivity. However, the safety of truck platoons seems to be sensitive to the choice of the path loos model.