Improving Vehicular Networking Reliability and Efficiency in the Context of Platooning Applications

Abstract

Vehicular networking is a technology that enables vehicles communication system. A joint effort from the automobile industry, transportation industry, and government offices is driving the adoption of this technology to build intelligent transportation systems that consist of smart vehicles. This study attempts to improve the reliability and efficiency of vehicular networking. The study assumes the context of platooning applications, but the contributions of this study can be applied to other vehicular applications as well.

There are two contributions in this study. First, a wireless emulator is designed and implemented to emulate IEEE 802.11 networks in real-time using the Ethernet infrastructure. The emulator replaces the MAC layer and physical layer of IEEE 802.11 networking stack with a real-time CSMA/CA model, thus reduces the cost of experiments. It provides upper layers the same interfaces as on a real device. As a result, the testing targets in the emulation are real-world software components as opposed to simulation scripts in a discrete event simulator. These software components can be routing protocols, transport protocols, or applications, and are the same code that can be deployed in the real world.

Second, an Interframe Compression Transmission Layer is designed and implemented, to provide efficient transmission of periodical messages in vehicular environments. The transmission layer compresses the difference between frames instead of frames themselves, and reduces bandwidth consumption significantly. To improve the behaviors of the transmission layer under different scenarios and configurations studied, an adaptive version of the algorithm is designed, which achieves more than 50\% in reduction of bandwidth consumption using real-world platooning data trace. With lower bandwidth consumption, delivery ratio is vastly improved in congested networking environments.