Markov Analysis of C-V2X Resource Reservation for Vehicle Platooning

Vehicle platooning utilizes automated driving and communication to let a group of vehicles travel closely, which improves road safety, traffic efficiency and fuel economy. In a platoon system, a critical task is to guarantee reliable communication among vehicles with efficient medium access control (MAC). This paper focuses on the feasibility of the distributed resource reservation MAC for communications among platoon vehicles using the cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technology. For this purpose, a Markov chain-based model is proposed, which precisely estimates the network performance with different information flow topologies and system configurations. The state transition matrix is deduced and the stable state distribution is obtained. Given the information flow topology, we derive the probability that a platoon vehicle successfully delivers packets to all of the designated receivers. Finally, simulation results validate the analysis. To better implement the MAC protocol in practice, we also discuss the success probability for various information flow topologies in platoon communication.