An ETSI ITS-Compliant Formation Protocol to Support Long Heterogeneous Platoons

As penetration of autonomous technology grows, vehicular platooning also becomes a reality with clear benefits on efficiency and traffic management. One can consider that platoons may grow to arbitrary lengths, limited solely by the ability of achieving reliable end-to-end communication. We introduce the Long Heterogeneous Platoon (LHP) protocol, meant to handle very long platoons composed of vehicles with different characteristics and facilities. It creates autonomous sub-units, sub-platoons, that facilitate platoon maneuvers and internal communication. Coordination is achieved by newly proposed ETSI ITS-compliant messages or containers; a key message is the Platoon Management Message. In this paper we describe the platoon formation and subplatoon creation procedures of the LHP protocol.