Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications for Platooning: Safety Analysis

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is the key technology enabling platooning. This letter proposes an analytical framework that combines the characteristics of V2V communication (packet loss probabilities and packet transmission delays) with the physical mobility characteristics of vehicles (speed, distance between vehicles and their brake capacities). First, we present the feasible region of communications delays which guarantees safe emergency braking in platooning scenarios. Second, we derive a bound on the probability of safe braking. The presented framework is applied to understand the performance of the state-of-the-art V2V communication protocol for platooning.