How to stop disagreeing and start cooperating in the presence of asymmetric packet loss
Journal article, 2018

We consider the design of a disagreement correction protocol in multi-vehicle systems. Vehicles broadcast in real-time vital information such as position, direction, speed, acceleration, intention, etc. This information is then used to identify the risks and adapt their trajectory to maintain the highest performance without compromising the safety. To minimize the risk due to the use of inconsistent information, all cooperating vehicles must agree whether to use the exchanged information to operate in a cooperative mode or use the only local information to operate in an autonomous mode. However, since wireless communications are prone to failures, it is impossible to deterministically reach an agreement. Therefore, any protocol will exhibit necessary disagreement periods. In this paper, we investigate whether vehicles can still cooperate despite communication failures even in the scenario where communication is suddenly not available. We present a deterministic protocol that allows all participants to either operate a cooperative mode when vehicles can exchange all the information in a timely manner or operate in autonomous mode when messages are lost. We show formally that the disagreement time is bounded by the time that the communication channel requires to delivermessages and validate our protocol using NS-3 simulations. We explain how the proposed solution can be used in vehicular platooning to attain high performance and still guarantee high safety standards despite communication failures.

Dependable communication protocols

Information quality in intelligent transportation systems

Cooperative systems

Author

Oscar Morales

The California State University

Elad Schiller

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Paolo Falcone

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Systems and control

Sensors

1424-8220 (ISSN) 1424-3210 (eISSN)

Vol. 18 4 1287

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Telecommunications

Communication Systems

DOI

10.3390/s18041287

More information

Latest update

5/3/2018 7