Visible light communication assisted safety message dissemination in multiplatoon

Platooning is a promising vehicle formation where autonomous vehicles are accessing each others information and grouped within a dose proximity. Multiplatoon, on the other hand, is an enhanced version of platooning that refers to the chain of platoons where platoons follow one another. One of the primary objectives for the multiplatoon system is to support data dissemination for different information types. Multiplatoon systems usually adopt the current dominant radio frequency (RF) technology IEEE 802.11p for communication. However, IEEE 802.11p suffers from problems of performance degradation due to the congestion, the scarcity of RF and security that may degrade the delay and delivery ratio of safety application. Visible Light Communication (VLC), on the other hand, is a promising complementary technology with the potential to address IEEE 802.11p problems. In this paper, we propose an IEEE 802.11p and VLC based hybrid safety dissemination protocol and investigate the hybrid safety message dissemination scheme in the presence of application level data traffic. We develop a simulation platform to realize the hybrid multiplatoon. We demonstrate that the packet loss results in low packet delivery ratio in IEEE 802.11p based multiplatoon. Although VLC increases the safety message dissemination performance, hybrid multiplatoon architecture still suffers from the disconnected network.