Velocity-adaptive Access Scheme for MEC-assisted Platooning Networks: Access Fairness Via Data Freshness

TL;DR

This paper proposes a velocity-adaptive access scheme for MEC-assisted platooning networks to improve fairness and data freshness by optimizing contention windows based on vehicle speeds, validated through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a joint optimization approach that adjusts IEEE 802.11 DCF parameters according to vehicle velocities to enhance fairness and data freshness in platooning networks.

Findings

Improved fairness in data transmission among vehicles with different velocities.

Reduced age of information (AoI) indicating fresher data delivery.

Enhanced overall network performance demonstrated via simulations.

Abstract

Platooning strategy is an important part of autonomous driving technology. Due to the limited resource of autonomous vehicles in platoons, mobile edge computing (MEC) is usually used to assist vehicles in platoons to obtain useful information, increasing its safety. Specifically, vehicles usually adopt the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism to transmit large amount of data to the base station (BS) through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, where the useful information can be extracted by the edge server connected to the BS and then sent back to the vehicles to make correct decisions in time. However, vehicles may be moving on different lanes with different velocities, which incurs the unfair access due to the characteristics of platoons, i.e., vehicles on different lanes transmit different amount of data to the BS when they pass through the coverage of the BS, which also results in the different amount of useful information received by various vehicles. Moreover, age of information (AoI) is an important performance metric to measure the freshness of the data. Large average age of data implies not receiving the useful information in time. It is necessary to design an access scheme to jointly optimize the fairness and data freshness. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem in the MEC-assisted V2I networks and present a multi-objective optimization scheme to solve the problem through adjusting the minimum contention window under the IEEE 802.11 DCF mode according to the velocities of vehicles. The effectiveness of the scheme has been demonstrated by simulation.