An Energy Efficient Message Dissemination Scheme in Platoon-Based Driving Systems

With the development of the convergence of IT and automotive technology, platoon-based driving systems are getting more attention and how to disseminate messages in the platoon is an important issue. In this paper, to enhance the energy efficiency and traffic throughput (e.g., average velocity) while meeting transmission deadlines, we propose an energy efficient message dissemination scheme (EMDS) in platoon-based driving systems, which also provides proper power control and relay selection. To find out the optimal policy to balance the probability of successful message dissemination and transmission power cost in EMDS, we formulate a Markov decision process (MDP) problem that considers the velocity of the vehicles in the platoon. To evaluate the performance of EMDS, we analyze the outage probability, the average velocity, and the expected power consumption using the discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) model. Evaluation results demonstrate EMDS with the optimal policy improves the average velocity and the energy efficiency of message dissemination compared with the conventional message dissemination schemes, while reducing the message dissemination failure rate.