LCD: Low Latency Command Dissemination for A Platoon of Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel linear dynamic programming algorithm to significantly reduce command dissemination latency in vehicular platoons, ensuring timely control message delivery to all vehicles.

Contribution

It presents a new dynamic programming approach and a closed-form latency model for vehicular platoons, improving dissemination efficiency and latency approximation.

Findings

Dissemination rate improved by at least 50.9%.

Latency gap within 0.2 seconds of optimal performance.

Proposed method outperforms existing algorithms.

Abstract

In a vehicular platoon, a lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates control commands to following vehicles based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications. However, reducing command dissemination latency with multiple vehicles while ensuring successful message delivery to the tail vehicle is challenging. We propose a new linear dynamic programming algorithm using backward induction and interchange arguments to minimize the dissemination latency of the vehicles. Furthermore, a closed form of dissemination latency in vehicular platoon is obtained by utilizing Markov chain with M/M/1 queuing model. Simulation results confirm that the proposed dynamic programming algorithm improves the dissemination rate by at least 50.9%, compared to similar algorithms in the literature. Moreover, it also approximates the best performance with the maximum gap of up to 0.2 second in terms of latency.