Better platooning toward autonomous driving: Inter-vehicle communications with directional antenna

Recently, in the researches on vehicular Internet-of-Things (IoT), platooning have received lots of attentions due to its potential to improve the fuel efficiency and driving experience. Platoon is a group of vehicles that act as smart agents, they travel collaboratively by following the leading human-driven vehicle. A vehicle in the platoon utilizes radar and wireless communication to share important information to other vehicles in the same platoon such as speed and acceleration, to realize the safe and efficient driving. The quality of wireless communication is of great importance to manage and maintain the platoons. However, in a scenario that a large number of vehicles exist, communication delay and packet loss caused by channel congestion may endanger the safe inter-vehicle distance. In this paper, we introduce inter-vehicle communication with directional antenna into platooning. By extensive simulations, we evaluate the packet delay and inter-vehicle distance in both normal driving and braking scenarios, and verify the usefulness of directional antenna in platooning for vehicular IoT.