Evaluation of a new Radio Technology and Visible Light Communication for a Platooning Application

The autonomous platoon is today one of the key tools for better road utilization. In fact, by optimizing the distance between vehicles, the air drag is reduced, and researchers have shown that 20% of energy can be saved by using this concept. From a network point of view, reducing the distance between vehicles will allow a new point-to-point communication link between the vehicles in front and behind by using Vehicular Visible Light Communication (V-VLC), thus providing an opportunity to have a hybrid communication. Our new radio design based on the AS-DTMAC protocol guarantees a high Quality of Service for real-time applications. However, with a very high density, we can reach the bandwidth dedicated to V2X radio. In the case of a platoon, this scenario can cause dangerous platoon instability. Assisting the radio with another communication vector such as V-VLC can help to maintain the high level of reliability that is necessary for the control of a platoon. In this paper, we first carry out an analytical analysis to investigate the capacity of our new radio technology to support the platoon control use case in terms of the quality of service (QoS) required for this type of application. Secondly, we show through extensive simulations the current level of VVLC technology, compared to radio technology, in terms of packet loss and delay.