High-Density Platooning in Cellular Vehicle-To-Everything Systems: On the Importance of Communication-Aware Networked Control Design

Fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks enable many vehicular communication applications by providing wireless interfaces for the exchange of messages among vehicles [vehicle to vehicle (V2V)] and among vehicles and pedestrians, infrastructure components, and application servers [vehicle to everything (V2X)]. Platoon networked control systems to maintain intervehicle distance (IVD) represent one of the most demanding use cases in V2X. Closed-loop feedback controllers introduced decades ago have been demonstrated to work with string stability and IVDs of only a few meters at highway speeds. However, the effects of temporally and spatially correlated packet losses, as experienced at the cell edge and during handovers, have not been sufficiently analyzed.