Analysis and Enhancement of Platoon Management in Smart City

Coordinated vehicles travelling in platoons can improve road capacity, reduce fuel consumption and offer a more comfortable travelling experience for the driver. However, for platooning to achieve such gains, headway distances between travelling cars have to be kept small even at high speeds. The feasibility of such platooning approach, hence relies entirely on the availability of fast and reliable information exchange between vehicles, which occurs over an unreliable wireless communication channel. In this paper, we analyse the dissemination of safety related messages in platoon-based VANETs. We propose an enhancement of the reliability of the dissemination algorithm by modifying the relay election procedure to include the bidirectional link quality in addition to distance criteria. A performance comparison is presented using simulations, which shows that our proposed enhancement provides comparable end-to-end delay with higher reliability for DENMs dissemination over platoons.