Increased Communication Reliability for Delay-Sensitive Platooning Applications on Top of IEEE 802.11p

Cooperative driving in platooning applications has received much attention lately due to its potential to lower fuel consumption and improve safety and efficiency on our roads. However, the recently adopted standard for vehicular communication, IEEE 802.11p, fails to support the level of reliability and realtime properties required by highly safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a communication and real-time analysis framework over a dedicated frequency channel for platoon applications and show that our retransmission scheme is able to decrease the message error rate of control data exchange within a platoon of moderate size by several orders of magnitude while still guaranteeing that all delay bounds are met. Even for long platoons with up to seventeen members the message error rate is significantly reduced by retransmitting erroneous packets without jeopardizing the timely delivery of regular data traffic.