Resource allocation for D2D-enabled inter-vehicle communications in multiplatoons

Platooning has been identified as a promising vehicular traffic management strategy to improve road capacity, energy efficiency, and on-road safety in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Inter-vehicle communications within a platoon and among multiple platoons can assist platoon control by maintaining a constant inter-vehicle distance, which in turn enhances road safety. An efficient method of sharing inter-vehicle information successfully and timely is critical to many platooning applications. In this paper, a resource allocation (RA) approach is proposed to support inter-vehicle communications underlaying cellular network for a multiplatooning (a chain of platoons) scenario. By applying the evolved multimedia broadcast multicast services (eMBMS) in the Evolved Node B (eNB), the transmission delay for intra-platoon and inter-platoon communications can be reduced. Then, using the proposed subchannel allocation and power control schemes, the number of required subchannels and the transmission powers of each vehicle and the eNB can be minimized. Numerical results show that the proposed approach outperforms the candidate RA scheme in terms of transmission delay, especially in a multiplatooning scenario with a large number of vehicles.