Performance Analysis of Embedded Platoon Controllers

Vehicle platooning is a technology capable of reducing the distance between vehicles, which in turn increases the road capacity and reduces the fuel consumption. In vehicle platooning, vehicles exchange information through wireless Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. The maximum message rate is limited by the traffic of vehicles equipped with V2V capabilities and the communication protocols. It can vary between 1Hz and 10Hz in IEEE 802. 11p. Many platoon control strategies in the literature do not consider the limited message rate and are not usable in real-life scenarios. One of the strategies capable of dealing with lower message rates uses Model Predictive Control (MPC), a type of optimal controller with a high computational cost. In this work, we analyze the performance of an MPC platoon control over IEEE 802. 11p using embedded platforms from Cohda Wireless and NXP Semiconductors. We consider a set of commonly used message rates -1, 2, 5 and 10Hz as well as sensor noise. We analyze the string stability and fuel consumption to evaluate the performance of the platoon controllers. We show that MPC provides satisfactory performance with a message rate as low as 1Hz and it outperforms the platoon control state-of-the-art techniques. Our results clearly show the need for taking into account message rate restrictions in the control algorithms.