Resource allocation for cellular-based inter-vehicle communications in autonomous multiplatoons

With the significant population growth in megacities everywhere, traffic congestion is becoming a severe impediment, leading to long travel delays and large economic loss on a global scale. Platooning is a promising intelligent transportation framework that can improve road capacity, on-road safety, and fuel efficiency. Furthermore, enabling inter-vehicle communications within a platoon and among platoons (in a multiplatoon) can potentially enhance platoon control by keeping constant inter-vehicle and inter-platoon distances. However, an efficient resource allocation (RA) approach is required for the timely and successful delivery of inter-vehicle information within multiplatoons. In this paper, subchannel allocation scheme and power control mechanism are proposed for LTE-based inter-vehicle communications in a multiplatooning scenario. We jointly consider the evolved multimedia broadcast multicast services and device-to-device (D2D) multicast communications to enable intra- and inter-platoon communications such that a desired tradeoff between the required cellular resources and the imposed communication delay can be achieved. Simulation results are given to demonstrate that the proposed approaches can reduce the communication delay comparing to D2D-unicast based RA scheme, especially in a multiplatoon scenario with a large number of vehicles.