Communication protocol for platoon of electric vehicles in mixed traffic scenarios

Vehicle platooning, where vehicles drive in a convoy with small relative distance, is a promising technology for road transportation. In particular, for Electric Vehicles (EVs), platoon of EVs (e-platoon) can help EVs not only reduce energy consumption but also allow them to exchange energy and charge their battery from a moving electric source on the fly. E-platooning requires Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication with very frequent information exchange and very high reliability between vehicles. This poses a big challenge on the communication system especially when e-platooning coexists with other safety-related applications in a mixed traffic scenario. In this work, we consider communication protocols based on ITS-G5 in the Control Channel (CCH) for e-platoon. We propose to use an additional with antennas for communication between e-platoon members and a deterministic distributed scheduling scheme together with dynamic switching of antenna beams. Simulations show that the our protocol can improve the performance of the communication between e-platoon members by reducing the Update Delay (UD) significantly.