Communication topologies evaluation for a vehicle merging into a platoon on highway

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication represents the main capability of vehicles that stays at the base of cooperative control solutions. Vehicle groups, e.g., platoons, exchange information about velocities to improve the performances of the traffic (i.e., reducing fuel consumption/emissions, improving the quality of the travel). Due to the importance of communication in literature, manifold types of communication topologies were proposed for various scenarios. In this paper, a study of the performances of the communication topologies is performed, starting from a cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) algorithm used to control the vehicles from a platoon in a specific scenario, four communication topologies were tested, and numerical analysis was performed to point out the advantages of each topology.