Vehicle to vehicle communication outage and its impact on convoy driving

Advanced vehicle control and safety systems are rapidly evolving around the globe, allowing the testing of convoying systems. A key element in such systems is the production of a reliable vehicle-to-vehicle communication link, capable of robust operation in a range of operating environments. This paper reports on a modelling study of one such system conducted as part of the Road Traffic Advisor project within the UK, based on a communication link in the millimetric waveband (approximately 60 GHz). The likely outage is examined for a basic inter-vehicle data link. This is used in conjunction with a simulation of convoy behaviour based on a control model to examine the effect of such outages on convoy operation. The paper concludes that the impact of the communication protocol and the communication outages on the control dynamics of an automated convoy would not degrade its performance.