Reducing Time Headway in Homogeneous CACC Vehicle Platoons in the Presence of Packet Drops

In this paper, we study the effect of packet losses in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication on string stability of a platoon of vehicles employing a Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) system. Such vehicles employ a Constant Time Headway Policy (CTHP) and utilize communicated information of the acceleration of preceding vehicle in the string. This communication is subject to packet losses in a realistic wireless system and we model the packet loss phenomenon as a binomial random process characterized by a packet reception probability. We assume that the platoon is homogeneous and derive the inverse relationship between the minimum string stable time headway and the packet reception probability. Numerical simulations corroborate the results presented in this paper.