Inter-vehicle Communication Research Articles

A Taxonomy of Optimization Factors for Platooning

The technical maturity of autonomous driving enables the discussion of beneficial use cases to leverage its full potential. In this paper, we target one such use case: Platooning is the efficient convoying of vehicles by making use of self-driving capabilities and inter-vehicle communication. Many advantages arise from grouping vehicles in platoons with a small inter-vehicle distance, such as energy savings, congestion reduction, and safety improvements. However, due to the diversity of involved stakeholders, numerous objectives have to be balanced to leverage the full potential of platooning. Furthermore, these objectives also depend on various factors that influence their optimization. The vast majority of existent literature only targets a subset of related objectives and underlying factors. This paper provides an overview which categorizes objectives and influencing factors. Additionally, metrics for the evaluation of objective attainment are proposed.

Co-Design of Consensus-Based Approach and Reliable Communication Protocol for Vehicular Platoon Control

Automated and coordinated vehicle platoon driving is challenging as the complexity of vehicle control and the presence of unreliable wireless inter-vehicle communication. This subject has an interdisciplinary nature, involving control theories, vehicle dynamics, and communication. Due to the constant interaction between control logic and communication topology, a co-design approach for the controller and for reliable communication protocol becomes necessary. This paper describes the AddP-CACC - a consensus-based solution to vehicle platoons. The proposed solution turns the communication topology into a design parameter that dynamically reconfigures the controller. In addition, the controller automatically compensates for outdated information caused by network losses and delays. AddP-CACC was implemented in the PLEXE tool and was compared with other related works. Simulation results have shown the robustness and performance of the proposed solution in various scenarios that would include realistic propagation conditions with interference caused by other vehicles. The results have also evidenced the ability of the proposed solution to maintain a stable vehicular platoon by using different communication topologies, different vehicle flows, even in the presence of strong interferences, delays, and fading conditions.

Swarm Of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles – Preliminary Results Of The Control System

A swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles can be a valuable alternative for fully equipped and very expensive super-vehicles. A distributed system of tightly cooperating vehicles can be cheaper, simpler in maintenance, more reliable, more flexible and universal than traditional single-vehicle systems. However, keeping a tight formation of underwater vehicles in the condition of the sea current, unclear environment, and rare inter-vehicle communication is a very challenging problem, which requires an effective vehicle control system. The paper proposes a solution to the above-mentioned problem, which is based on neuro-evolution. Moreover, the paper also presents the first results of the proposed system.

Cybersecurity attacks on CAN bus based vehicles: a review and open challenges

PurposeNowadays, connected vehicles are becoming quite complex systems which are made up of different devices. In such a vehicle, there are several electronic control units (ECUs) that represent basic units of computation. These ECUs communicate with each other over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus protocol which ensures a high communication rate. Even though it is an efficient standard which provides communication for in-vehicle networks, it is prone to various cybersecurity attacks. This paper aims to present a systematic literature review (SLR) which focuses on potential attacks on CAN bus networks. Then, it surveys the solutions proposed to overcome these attacks. In addition, it investigates the validation strategies aiming to check their accuracy and correctness.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have adopted the SLR methodology to summarize existing research papers that focus on the potential attacks on CAN bus networks. In addition, they compare the selected papers by classifying them according to the adopted validation strategies. They identify also gaps in the existing literature and provide a set of open challenges that can significantly improve the existing works.FindingsThe study showed that most of the examined papers adopted the simulation as a validation strategy to imitate the system behavior and evaluate a set of performance criteria. Nevertheless, a little consideration has been given to the formal verification of the proposed systems.Originality/valueUnlike the existing surveys, this paper presents the first SLR that identifies local and remote security attacks that can compromise in-vehicle and inter-vehicle communications. Moreover, it compares the reviewed papers while focusing on the used validation strategies.

Context-Aware Naming and Forwarding in NDN-Based VANETs.

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a technology that allows ubiquitous mobility to mobile users. Inter-vehicle communication is an integral component of intelligent transportation systems that enables a wide variety of applications where vehicles interact and cooperate with each other, from safety applications to non-safety applications. VANETs applications have different needs (e.g., latency, reliability, delivery priorities, etc.) in terms of delivery effectiveness. In the last decade, named data networking (NDN) gained the attention of the research community for effective content retrieval and dissemination in mobile environments such as VANETs. In NDN, the content’s name has a vital role in storing and retrieving the content effectively and efficiently. In NDN-based VANETs, adaptive content dissemination solutions must be introduced that can make decisions related to forwarding, cache management, etc., based on context information represented by a content name. In this context, our main contributions are two-fold: (i) we present the hierarchical context-aware content-naming (CACN) scheme for NDN-based VANETs that enables naming the safety and non-safety applications, and (ii) we present a decentralized context-aware notification (DCN) protocol that broadcasts event notification information for awareness within the application-based geographical area. Simulation results show that the proposed DCN protocol succeeds in achieving reduced transmissions, bandwidth, and energy compared to existing critical contents dissemination protocols.

Better platooning toward autonomous driving: Inter-vehicle communications with directional antenna

Recently, in the researches on vehicular Internet-of-Things (IoT), platooning have received lots of attentions due to its potential to improve the fuel efficiency and driving experience. Platoon is a group of vehicles that act as smart agents, they travel collaboratively by following the leading human-driven vehicle. A vehicle in the platoon utilizes radar and wireless communication to share important information to other vehicles in the same platoon such as speed and acceleration, to realize the safe and efficient driving. The quality of wireless communication is of great importance to manage and maintain the platoons. However, in a scenario that a large number of vehicles exist, communication delay and packet loss caused by channel congestion may endanger the safe inter-vehicle distance. In this paper, we introduce inter-vehicle communication with directional antenna into platooning. By extensive simulations, we evaluate the packet delay and inter-vehicle distance in both normal driving and braking scenarios, and verify the usefulness of directional antenna in platooning for vehicular IoT.

Link Failure Tolerant GPSR Protocol

Link failure cause packet loss, increased delays, disconnection from the network or even the shutdown of the inter-vehicle communication system vehicle-to-vehicle. Routing protocols suffer from this situation due to the lack of fault tolerance mechanisms that are intended to make the vehicular ad hoc network capable of remaining functional over time with low response time and/or high throughput; despite failures. Through this paper, we propose a version of the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol that is tolerant to link failures based on the prediction of the future position of each vehicle (position prediction-GPSR) and a minimum threshold of the vehicle coverage area (position predictive with threshold-GPSR) to elect the next hops. Simulation results show that the proposed approach offers good performance.

Analysis and Experimental Investigation of the Light Dimming Effect on Automotive Visible Light Communications Performances.

The use of Visible Light Communications (VLC) in vehicular applications has become a major research area due to its simplicity, high performance to cost ratio, and great deployment potential. In this context, this article provides one of the very few analyses and experimental evaluations concerning the integration of a light dimming function in vehicular VLC systems. For this purpose, a vehicle-to-vehicle VLC prototype has been implemented and used to evaluate the systems’ communication performances in light dimming conditions, while decreasing the duty cycle from 40% to 1%, and increasing the communication range from 1 to 40–50 m. The experimental results showed that in normal lighting conditions, the VLC technology can easily support low duty cycle light dimming for ranges up to 40 m, while maintaining a 10−6 BER. Nevertheless, in strong optical noise conditions, when the system reaches its SNR limit, the communication range can decrease by half, whereas the BER can increase by 2–4 orders of magnitude. This article provides consistent evidence concerning the high potential of the VLC technology to support inter-vehicle communication links, even in light dimming conditions.

Decentralized event-triggered cooperative path-following control for multiple autonomous surface vessels under actuator failures

This paper investigates the problem of cooperative path-following control for underactuated autonomous surface vessels in the presence of the model uncertainties, environmental disturbance, actuator failures and limited communication. A novel intelligent controller is designed for autonomous surface vessels to track priori parameterized reference paths so that the desired formation can be achieved. In the algorithm, the model uncertainties are estimated by neural networks. By virtue of the dynamic surface control technique, the inherent problem ”explosion of complexity” occurred in the traditional Backstepping design framework is avoided. A concise adaptive law is developed to compensate the upper bound of the weight matrix for neural networks, rather than the whole weight matrix. Furthermore, the event-triggered mechanism is embedded into the cooperative controller to reduce the frequency of inter-vehicle communication. The cooperative controller is updated only at the instant when the threshold condition is violated. By using the Lyapunov theory, both the semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded and fault-tolerance capability of the closed-loop system are guaranteed. Finally, numerical examples are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Authentication strategies in vehicular communications: a taxonomy and framework

In intelligent vehicular networks, vehicles have enhanced sensing capabilities and carry computing and communication platforms to enable new versatile systems known as Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. Vehicles communicate with other vehicles and with nearby fixed equipment to support different applications, including those which increase driver awareness of the surroundings. This should result in improved safety and may optimize traffic. However, VC systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks involving message manipulation. Research aimed at tackling this problem has resulted in the proposal of multiple authentication protocols. Several existing survey papers have attempted to classify some of these protocols based on a limited set of characteristics. However, to date there is no generic framework to support the comparison of these protocols and provide guidance for design and evaluation. Most existing classifications either use computation complexity of cryptographic techniques as a criterion, or they fail to make connections between different important aspects of authentication. This paper provides such a framework, proposing a new taxonomy to enable a consistent means of classifying authentication schemes based upon seven main criteria. The main contribution of this study is a framework to enable protocol designers and investigators to adequately compare and select authentication schemes when deciding on particular protocols to implement in an application. Our framework can be applied in design, making choices appropriate for the intended context in both intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle communications. We demonstrate the application of our framework using two different types of case study: individual analysis and hypothetical design. Additionally, this work makes several related contributions. We present the network model, outline the applications, list the communication patterns and the underlying standards, and discuss the necessity of using cryptography and key management in VC systems. We also review the threats, authentication, and privacy requirements in vehicular networks.

Evaluation of Misalignment Effect in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Visible Light Communications: Experimental Demonstration of a 75 Meters Link.

The use of visible light communications technology in communication-based vehicle applications is gaining more and more interest as the research community is constantly overcoming challenge after challenge. In this context, this article addresses the issues associated with the use of Visible Light Communications (VLC) technology in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, while focusing on two crucial issues. On the one hand, it aims to investigate the achievable communication distance in V2V applications while addressing the least favorable case, namely the one when a standard vehicle rear lighting system is used as a VLC emitter. On the other hand, this article investigates another highly unfavorable use case scenario, i.e., the case when two vehicles are located on adjacent lanes, rather than on the same lane. In order to evaluate the compatibility of the VLC technology with the usage in inter-vehicle communication, a VLC prototype is intensively evaluated in outdoor conditions. The experimental results show a record V2V VLC distance of 75 m, while providing a Bit Error Ratio (BER) of 10−7–10−6. The results also show that the VLC technology is able to provide V2V connectivity even in a situation where the vehicles are located on adjacent lanes, without a major impact on the link performances. Nevertheless, this situation generates an initial no-coverage zone, which is determined by the VLC receiver reception angle, whereas in some cases, vehicle misalignment can generate a BER increase that can go up to two orders of magnitude.

Optimization and Evaluation of Platooning Car-Following Models in a Connected Vehicle Environment

With the rapid development of information and communication technology, future intelligent transportation systems will exhibit a trend of cooperative driving of connected vehicles. Platooning is an important application technique for cooperative driving. Herein, optimized car-following models for platoon control based on intervehicle communication technology are proposed. On the basis of existing indicators, a series of evaluation methods for platoon safety, stability, and energy consumption is constructed. Numerical simulations are used to compare the effects of three traditional models and their optimized counterparts on the car-following process. Moreover, the influence of homogenous and heterogeneous attributes on the platoon is analyzed. The optimized model proposed in this paper can improve the stability and safety of vehicle following and reduce the total fuel consumption. The simulation results show that a homogenous platoon can enhance the overall stability of the platoon and that the desired safety margin (DSM) model is better suited for heterogeneous platoon control than the other two models. This paper provides a practical method for the design and systematic evaluation of a platoon control strategy, which is one of the key focuses in the connected and autonomous vehicle industry.

Study on QoS Management for Video Streaming in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET)

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a particular type of MANET providing various wireless communications such as infrastructure communications and inter-vehicle communications. Recently, VANET networks are attracting ample attention from the scientific and business community. In VANET networks, the textual data is almost negligible compared to the multimedia data that is interactive and expressive. Quality management of video streaming over the VANET environment is a complex task, given the specific constraints of multimedia data in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), security, system performance, and a random number of vehicles. This article discusses existing video streaming techniques in VANET networks by highlighting different QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics related to video streaming. A comparative study of video streaming models of literature on VANET is presented, taking into consideration several QoS and QoE metrics. Finally, the trends in video broadcasting in VANET networks are identified as future research directions. We believe that our comprehensive survey will enhance the understanding of video streaming tasks in the VANET environment and provide useful knowledge about the research trends and directions. VANET environment and provide useful knowledge about the research trends and directions.

Control Efficient Power Allocation of Uplink NOMA in UAV-Aided Vehicular Platooning

Power allocation in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems is essential to avoid multi-user detection failure. However, controlling the uplink transmission power brings extra signaling overhead, especially in dynamic environments. In this paper, we investigate the uplink transmission power allocation problem in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided platooning NOMA system, where the UAV acts as a relay to assist inter-vehicle communications. Platoon vehicles are admitted to the same vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) channel via our proposed sequence-based power allocation (SPA) strategy. Instead of achieving the optimal energy efficiency, our goal is to design a simple yet effective power control scheme. Specially, in SPA strategy, vehicles determine their transmission power according to their positions in the platoon. Considering platoon dynamics due to vehicle mobility, a power-reserved mechanism is further incorporated in the proposed strategy to pre-allocate power resources for newly joined vehicles. In addition, a power-moving mechanism is further employed to guarantee the uplink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of vehicles by changing vehicle transmission power into higher levels during vehicle leaving a platoon. As the system only needs to update vehicle positions for the SPA strategy, only a small amount of signaling is required in our power allocation strategy. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed SPA strategy ensures the required SINR of platoon communication in different dynamic scenarios.

A Cooperative Space Distribution Method for Autonomous Vehicles at A Lane-Drop Bottleneck on Multi-Lane Freeways

With the help of inter-vehicle communication (IVC), autonomous vehicles (AVs) can drive cooperatively, thus significantly improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and environmental sustainability. While substantial research has been conducted to investigate the efficiency of AVs in transportation systems, few attempts have been carried out to explore the lane-changing operations of AVs in multi-lane freeways, especially the dynamics of AVs at lane-drop bottlenecks. To this end, this paper aims to develop a cooperative space distribution method (CSDM) not only to increase the lane-drop bottleneck’s throughput but also to equally distribute the AVs in the dropped lane to other lanes by efficiently coordinating the dynamics of AVs upstream of the bottleneck in a multi-lane freeway. More specifically, we propose a novel framework where the freeway (region of interest) is divided into three segments: i) platoon segment, ii) acceleration segment, and iii) merging segment. In the first segment, AVs travel together in the platoon to guarantee their safety; they will then speed up to attain the maximum velocity and reach the determined position in the second segment. Finally, these AVs change lanes in the last segment and pass through the bottleneck with maximum velocity and minimum gap (i.e., gap distance). Simulation results are tested to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, where we show that the proposed framework can significantly decrease the average travel time of all vehicles.

Analysis of Quality of Service in VANET

VANET as Inter-vehicle communication is becoming a promising area of research, standardization, and growth with the ever-growing number of vehicles equipped with computer technology and wireless communication tools. Due to its erratic portability and the interrupted availability of a network, VANET is relatively incomprehensible for a strong end to end communication, In Vehicular Network the main advantage is that it communicates by using nodes. Because of its simple and basic method of communication, MANET is used most often in the military, just like data sharing between different computers. VANET and some modifications are identical to MANET. VANET encompass the mobile nodes which are indicated as (MN), The vehicle networking system has drawn significant interest from academia and industry since its establishment. Its technology is used for military purposes by several foreign manufacturing and government sectors, it also enables a wide range of applications, including collision prevention, security, blind crossing, dynamic route planning, traffic condition monitoring on a real-time basis, etc but there are certain loopholes or drawbacks like frequent network drop, high mobility which affected the overall QoS, In this paper, there are brief analyses on Quality of Service which include certain Routing Protocol like DIVERT, FBAODV, DSR and also to decrease the congestion control, there is a comparative study of the different protocol which evaluates in increasing the throughput and network efficiency.

Computation Offloading in a Cognitive Vehicular Networks with Vehicular Cloud Computing and Remote Cloud Computing.

To satisfy the explosive growth of computation-intensive vehicular applications, we investigated the computation offloading problem in a cognitive vehicular networks (CVN). Specifically, in our scheme, the vehicular cloud computing (VCC)- and remote cloud computing (RCC)-enabled computation offloading were jointly considered. So far, extensive research has been conducted on RCC-based computation offloading, while the studies on VCC-based computation offloading are relatively rare. In fact, due to the dynamic and uncertainty of on-board resource, the VCC-based computation offloading is more challenging then the RCC one, especially under the vehicular scenario with expensive inter-vehicle communication or poor communication environment. To solve this problem, we propose to leverage the VCC’s computation resource for computation offloading with a perception-exploitation way, which mainly comprise resource discovery and computation offloading two stages. In resource discovery stage, upon the action-observation history, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model is proposed to predict the on-board resource utilizing status at next time slot. Thereafter, based on the obtained computation resource distribution, a decentralized multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm is proposed to solve the collaborative computation offloading with VCC and RCC. Last but not least, the proposed algorithms’ effectiveness is verified with a host of numerical simulation results from different perspectives.

Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Target Tracking with Time-Varying Localization Uncertainty via Recursive Variational Bayesian Inference.

Cooperative target tracking by multiple vehicles connected through inter-vehicle communication is a promising way to improve the estimation of target state. The effectiveness of cooperative tracking closely depends on the accuracy of relative localization between host and cooperative vehicles. However, the localization signal usually provided by the satellite-based navigation system is rather susceptible to dynamic driving environment, thus influencing the effectiveness of cooperative tracking. In order to implement reliable cooperative tracking, especially when the statistical characteristic of the relative localization noise is time-varying and uncertain, this paper presents a recursive Bayesian framework which jointly estimates the state of the target and the cooperative vehicle as well as the localization noise parameter. An online variational Bayesian inference algorithm is further developed to achieve efficient recursive estimate. The simulation results verify that our proposed algorithm can effectively boost the accuracy of target tracking when the localization noise dynamically changes over time.

Interaction-Aware Motion Prediction for Autonomous Driving: A Multiple Model Kalman Filtering Scheme

We consider the problem of predicting the motion of vehicles in the surrounding of an autonomous car, for improved motion planning in lane-based driving scenarios without inter-vehicle communication. First, we address the problem of single-vehicle estimation by designing a filtering scheme based on an Interacting Multiple Model Kalman Filter equipped with novel intention-based models. Second, we augment the proposed scheme with an optimization-based projection that enables the generation of non-colliding predictions. We then extend the approach to the problem of simultaneously estimating multiple vehicles by using a hierarchical approach based on a priority list. The priority list is dynamically adapted in real-time according to a proposed sorting algorithm. Finally, we evaluate the proposed scheme in simulations using real-life vehicle data from the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) dataset.

Toward Smart Vehicle-to-Everything-Connected Powertrains: Driving Real Component Test Benches in a Fully Interactive Virtual Smart City

In the context of increasing electrification and the automation of future mobility, research and development of efficient powertrains requires enhanced test methods. One important aspect to consider is the complex interactions among a smart driving strategy, traffic flow, an individual vehicle's energy demand and emissions, and the corresponding overall values. Until now, the respective development domains of traffic flow control, powertrain control, component design, and intervehicle communication have usually been considered separately. This article presents a methodology that combines these areas and enables developers to obtain deep and highly realistic system insights, taking into account the mutual interactions among the domains. For this purpose, an X-in-the-loop validation platform is constructed that builds upon vehicular networking, road traffic, and a vehicle simulator, all coupled with two real drive-unit component test benches. We further show how this methodology can be used to investigate the effects of a novel predictive powertrain control algorithm that takes vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication into account. Focusing on a typical urban reference route, we demonstrate that our algorithm enables performance to be maintained using electric motors with reduced specifications.