Age of Information in V2V-Enabled Platooning Systems

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-enabled platooning is a promising application for future intelligent transportation systems. V2V communications allow real-time sharing of vehicle status information within the platoon, enabling vehicles to dynamically adjust their control strategies and maintain spacing between platoon members. As such, the platoon stability depends on the timeliness of the control information. However, the information timeliness can be affected by factors, such as transmission period, co-channel interference and actuator lag. In this article, the performance of the V2V communication is analyzed for the platooning, from an information timeliness perspective. First, an Age-of-Information (AoI)-based joint communication and control model is proposed to determine the requirement of the AoI to maintain the stability. Then, a large-scale V2V communication model is constructed by taking account of the V2V packet transmission and resource allocation scheme. Considering the spatiotemporal correlation among the V2V transmissions, the distribution of the average AoI and average peak AoI are investigated, by using the queuing theory and stochastic geometry. The analytical results can reveal the proportions of the stable platoons in the large-scale networks. Simulation results corroborate the analytical results and demonstrate the impact of the system parameters on the platoon stability. Furthermore, simulation results showed that the requirements of the maximum transmission period and the maximum actuator lag can be analytically obtained. More importantly, it is shown that the proposed model and the analytical results could provide insightful guidelines for designing the V2V-enabled platooning systems.