Resource Reservation Coordination for Vehicle Platooning in C-V2X Networks

High-reliability and low-latency communication is essential for timely information exchange in vehicle platooning. As a key enabler of this, the cellular vehicular-to-everything (C-V2X) network uses a sensing-based semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) protocol, where radio resources are reserved for a number of transmissions with reduced resource re-allocation and control overhead. However, consecutive access collisions may be caused by reservation conflict, which leads to long delay and threatens platoon’s stability and safety. In this paper, a coordinating resource reservation (CRR) protocol is proposed for vehicle platooning. By implementing error detection with coordination among platoon vehicles, the resource reservation is improved for reduced collisions and delay. Specifically, packet reception/loss information is sent out by platoon vehicles through their own packets. Such information is shared with transmitters and guides them to reserve new resources when access collision occurs. As a result, long delay is avoided while no extra feedback packet is introduced. Furthermore, Markov analysis is presented to evaluate the performance of SPS and the proposed CRR for vehicle platooning, providing the quantified performance gains. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CRR in reducing packet loss and latency, compared with the legacy SPS and other state-of-the-art solutions.