Abstract

Platooning empowers vehicles to drive in coordinated convoys, improving road utilization, emissions, traffic flow, and road safety. To realize platooning, reliable wireless communication is required. Although designed for freeways, platooning could be especially beneficial in urban environments facing pollution, accidents, and congestion challenges. However, current system designs for platooning are not tailored to the characteristics of urban environments. This dissertation addresses the benefits and challenges of wireless communication among platooning vehicles (intra-platoon communication) and the coordination of multiple platoons (inter-platoon coordination) for the first time with a dedicated focus on urban environments. For this, we first evaluate the viability of platooning in urban environments, considering mobility and wireless communication aspects. Using our approach for dynamic platoon formation, we show that urban platooning massively enhances travel time and fuel consumption compared to traditional driving. Additionally, we demonstrate the limitations of solely using Radio Frequency (RF) communication and underscore the shortcomings of Vehicular Visible Light Communication (V-VLC) in urban environments compared to its beneficial use on freeways. Second, we present novel strategies for intra-platoon communication, resulting in LUNA, a novel approach combining beamforming and Full-Duplex Relaying (FDR) for urban platooning. Our evaluation shows that LUNA, unlike traditional approaches such as V-VLC, is appropriate for freeway and urban scenarios, achieving a 100 % PDR on freeways and negligible packet loss in an urban environment. Third, we investigate the potential of urban infrastructure for inter-platoon coordination in future smart cities. We show that an opportunistic use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to relay wireless transmissions of vehicles outperforms a dedicated UAV deployment and can further coordinate wireless channel access, substantially reducing packet loss compared to scenarios without UAVs. In this thesis, we demonstrate the feasibility of urban platooning and present approaches for reliable wireless communication, thereby providing a step towards its realization and the foundation for future research.

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BibTeX reference

@phdthesis{hardes2024cooperative,
  author = {Hardes, Tobias},
  title = {{Cooperative Mobility in Urban Environments}},
  advisor = {Sommer, Christoph},
  institution = {Faculty of Computer Science,},
  location = {Dresden, Germany},
  month = {June},
  referee = {Sommer, Christoph and Casetti, Claudio Ettore},
  school = {Technical University of Dresden (TUD)},
  type = {PhD Thesis},
  year = {2024},
}