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Connected and automated vehicles mandate integrated design of communications and control to achieve coordination of highway vehicles. Random features of wireless communications introduce new types of uncertainties into networked systems and impact control performance significantly. Due to typical packet loss, erasure channels create random link interruption and switching in network topologies. This paper models such switching network topologies by Markov chains and derives their probability transition matrices from stochastic characterizations of the channels. Impact of communication erasure channels on vehicle platoon formation and robustness under a weighted and constrained consensus framework is analyzed. By comparing convergence properties of networked control algorithms under different communication channel features, we characterize some intrinsic relationships between packet delivery ratio and convergence rate. Simulation case studies are performed to verify the theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]