Optimal Rate-Adaptive Data Dissemination in Vehicular Platoons

In intelligent transportation systems, wireless connected vehicles moving in platoons can improve roads’ throughput. For managing driving status of the platoon, a lead vehicle transmits driving information to following autonomous vehicles by using multi-hop data dissemination. We study a novel data dissemination protocol which investigates a chain-based transmit rate control to reduce data dissemination latency. The optimal resource allocation algorithm is formulated to minimize the total dissemination latency of the platoon under guaranteed bit error rates, and can be judiciously reformulated and solved using standard optimization techniques. A novel dynamic programming algorithm is presented to solve the platooning resource allocation optimization, which uses backward induction to significantly reduce the resource allocation complexity. In addition, we interpret the vehicular platoon as one-dimensional Markov chain, and derive a closed form of dissemination latency. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed dynamic programming algorithm. The numerical results show that our algorithm achieves optimal solutions with cutting off the complexity by orders of magnitude, while improving dissemination rate in the vehicular platoon.