A Platoon-Centric Multi-Channel Access Scheme for Hybrid Traffic

Self-driving technology has made great advancements with the help of artificial intelligence and intelligent transportation system. Recent studies have shown that traffic efficiency and safety of autonomous vehicles can be further improved by autonomous platooning based on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, hybrid traffic where autonomous platoons (APs) and individual human driven-vehicles (HDVs) co-exists is seldom considered. Wireless Access in the Vehicular Environment (WAVE) is the de facto wireless protocol for VANETs. WAVE has provided one control channel (CCH) and six service channels (SCHs). The multi-channel access scheme should be jointly designed along with the CCH communication protocol. To design a reliable and efficient communication protocol for hybrid traffic, we propose a platoon-centric multi-channel access scheme based on the reliable broadcast. The reliable broadcast scheme utilizes an enhanced RTS/CTS mechanism designed for multicast communications. A broadcast frequency control mechanism is proposed to balance CCH access intervals. Our scheme can improve the reliability of CCH communication and increase SCH utilization with minimal overhead. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed mechanism.