ITS-G5 Challenges and 5G Solutions for Vehicular Platooning

Vehicle platooning is an intelligent transportation system (ITS) application in which vehicles drive in close cooperative formations. Platooning has the potential to increase safety and road capacity as well as reduce fuel consumption. Each vehicle in a platoon adapts its acceleration and speed with the help of a cooperative adaptive cruise controller (CACC) based on information received from other platoon members. In order to operate the platoon safely, the communication system has to fulfill stringent requirements regarding both, delay and reliability. We investigate in this paper the performance of ITS-G5 communication system for platoon applications in order to show whether ITS-G5 can satisfy vehicle platooning requirements or not. For this, we choose as performance metrics the packet delivery rate (PDR) and the end-to-end (E2E) delay, as well as the update delay (UD). The UD is defined as the time elapsed between two consecutive successfully received messages from a specific TX at a specific RX. Simulation results show that ITS-G5 is unable to provide a reliable communication for platooning due to two reasons: the UD is too large and the PDR is too low. Therefore, there is a clear need for a new communication technology for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V). In this regard, 5G is a candidate communication technology that delivers ultra-low latencies and ultra-high reliability to enable efficient, reliable, robust, and safe vehicle platooning.