Vehicular communication performance in convoys of automated vehicles

The combination of automated driving and Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) allows automated vehicles to drive cooperatively, thereby greatly enhancing their safety and traffic efficiency. Convoys are groups of automated vehicles which keep a multi-lane formation with decentralized control supported by IVC. The vehicle control algorithm of convoy vehicles requires up-to-date information about the neighbor vehicle dynamics; fast and efficient convoy communications enable the cooperative maneuvering of the automated vehicles. For this reason, we evaluate IVC in convoys of automated vehicles by defining performance metrics which quantify the reliability, latency and data age of convoy communications. Our results explore the trade-off between the convoy message frequency and the communication performance; whereas a high message frequency results in a higher number of lost messages and delay due to channel congestion, a low message frequency yields a higher data age of the information available to the vehicle controller. As a result, convoy algorithm designers should choose carefully the optimal value for the convoy message frequency as a function of the required communication performance and the convoy size.