In the past few years, vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has attracted significant attention and many fundamental issues have been investigated, such as network connectivity, medium access control (MAC) mechanism, routing protocol, quality of service (QoS), etc. Nevertheless, most related work has been based on simplified assumptions on the underlying vehicle traffic dynamics, which has a tight interaction with VANET in practice. In this paper, we try to investigate VANET performance from the vehicular cyber-physical system (VCPS) perspective. Specifically, we consider VANET connectivity of platoonbased VCPSs where all vehicles drive in platoon-based patterns, which facilitate better traffic performance as well as information services. We first propose a novel architecture for platoon-based VCPSs, then we derive the vehicle distribution under platoon-based driving patterns on a highway. Based on the results, we further investigate inter-platoon connectivity in a bi-directional highway scenario and evaluate the expected time of safety message delivery among platoons, taking into account the effects of system parameters, such as traffic flow, velocity, platoon size and transmission range. Extensive simulations are conducted which validate the accuracy of our analysis. This study will be helpful to understand the behavior of VCPSs, and will be helpful to improve vehicle platoon design and deployment.
Jia et al. REF take into account vehicle mobility to establish a platoon, such as traffic flow, bandwidth, platoon speed, and size.
On the network connectivity of platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical systems
Transportation Research Part C-emerging Technologies
Engineering