Platooning is often considered as the example application for cooperative driving. The idea of platooning is to have several vehicles driving in a convoy while being connected using a wireless channel. This channel is used to exchange information about the current position, speed, or desired acceleration. Different publications [1,2] have shown that a communications failure has severe consequences for a platoon. In the worst case, this leads to vehicle collisions at freeway speed.

Goals of the thesis

In this work, we will explore various ways in which a UAV can support communication within a platoon. For this purpose, different scenarios will be considered (e.g. very long platoons, buildings, channel access methods, …) to assess the impact of a UAV support. Appropriate metrics have to be defined, implemented and evaluated. Performance investigations will be building on [Veins][VEINS], an open-source vehicular network simulation framework that can simulate wireless networks of cars, and [The INET Framework][INET], an open-source model suite for the OMNeT++ discrete event simulator.

Keywords

C++, Network Simulation

Literature

[1] M. Segata, B. Bloessl, S. Joerer, C. Sommer, M. Gerla, R. Lo Cigno, and F. Dressler, “Towards Communication Strategies for Platooning: Simulative and Experimental Evaluation,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2015, in print, available online https://doi.org/10.1109/TVT.2015.2489459

[2] Tobias Hardes and Christoph Sommer, “Towards Heterogeneous Communication Strategies for Urban Platooning at Intersections,” Proceedings of 11th IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2019), Los Angeles, CA, December 2019, pp. 322–329 https://doi.org/10.1109/VNC48660.2019.9062835