2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC): Workshop: 2nd

International Workshop on Vehicular Networking and Intelligent Transportation systems (VENITS'16)

Communication Protocol for Platoon of Electric

Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Scenarios
Hong Quy Le, Ibrahim Rashdan, and Stephan Sand
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Institute of Communications and Navigation
Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
Email: {Ibrahim.Rashdan, Stephan.Sand}@dlr.de

Abstract—Vehicle platooning, where vehicles drive in a convoy

with small relative distance, is a promising technology for road
transportation. In particular, for Electric Vehicles (EVs), platoon
of EVs (e-platoon) can help EVs not only reduce energy consump-
tion but also allow them to exchange energy and charge their
battery from a moving electric source on the fly. E-platooning
requires Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication with very fre-
quent information exchange and very high reliability between
vehicles. This poses a big challenge on the communication system
especially when e-platooning coexists with other safety-related
applications in a mixed traffic scenario.
In this work, we consider communication protocols based
on ITS-G5 in the Control Channel (CCH) for e-platoon. We
propose to use an additional with antennas for communication
between e-platoon members and a deterministic distributed
scheduling scheme together with dynamic switching of antenna
beams. Simulations show that the our protocol can improve the
performance of the communication between e-platoon members
by reducing the Update Delay (UD) significantly.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the majority of vehicles in road transportation
are internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. They burn
fossil fuels, which are the main cause of green house gas
emission. Recently, electric vehicles (EVs) that use batteries
are emerging as a potential alternative to ICE vehicles. How-
ever, due to the limitation of the current technology, EVs have
short range and long recharging time. These drawbacks make
current EVs less suitable for long-range trips.
Platooning, where vehicles drive in a convoy with short
distance, is a promising technology to improve road traffic.
Platooning is expected to provide many advantages e.g. higher
traffic throughput, improved traffic safety, and lower energy
consumption due to slipstreaming [1].
E-platooning is a concept based on platooning to allow EVs
recharge their battery on the fly. In an e-platoon, EVs can
share energy with each other and recharge from an electric
source carried by a truck (see Fig. 1). In order to transport
energy from the truck to e-platoon EVs and between EVs,
vehicles need to be equipped with suitable connectors, which
may be either wired or wireless technology. The focus of this
work is the communication between platoon members, thus
the technical details of exchanging energy between EVs are
out of scope of this paper.
E-platooning and platooning in general are realized with
cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) technology and
Fig. 1. E-platooning concept: EVs drive in a platoon with short gaps to
share electric energy; truck provides additional energy to the platoon, e.g.
from batteries or fuel cells. Here, the focus is on the required communication
between platoon members.
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication [2]. The vehicles in
a platoon exchange their dynamic state information e.g. speed,
position, heading, etc, and coordinate their movement via V2V
communication. With the vehicle state information and control
command from others and its own state information from on-
board sensors, each vehicle in an e-platoon can adapt its own
acceleration and speed with the help of the CACC controller
to keep the inter-vehicle distance or the time gap at a desired
constant value.
In Europe, ITS-G5 is a new standard for V2V commu-
nication. It is based on IEEE 802.11p and operates in the
5.9 GHz frequency band. Cooperative Awareness Message
(CAM) is used for exchanging status information between
vehicles periodically. The update rate of the CAM between
normal vehicles and between normal vehicles and platoon’s
vehicles is up to 10 Hz [3]. However, the requirement on the
communication among the platoon members is much higher.
According to some real-world experiments for platooning, the
CAM update rate among the platoon members varies between
25 Hz for a time gap of 0.6 s (Connect&Drive project [4]) and
40 Hz for an inter-vehicle distance of 6 m (SARTRE project
[5]).
The impact of communication impairment on platooning
performance and the development of new communication pro-
tocols for the platooning application have recently become an
active area of research. One of the first papers that addressed
this issue is [6]. Liu et. al. showed with analytical proof that
communication delay can cause platoon instability. Fernandes
et. al. [7] assessed how communication delay and packet loss
affect the platoon stability and proposed five different TDMA-
based information update algorithms to mitigate it. Through
computer simulations, C. Lei et al. [8] concluded that CAMs
update rate and packet loss ratio have significant influence
on platoon stability. M. Segata et. al. [9], [10] identified
some open challenges of communication for platooning and

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 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC): Workshop: 2nd
International Workshop on Vehicular Networking and Intelligent Transportation systems (VENITS'16)
presented a simulation framework to tackle the challenges and
outline promising approaches. They also proposed a communi-
cation protocol based on TDMA and a transmit power control
algorithm to deal with high vehicle density scenarios.
Different from the previously mentioned works, in our ap-
proach, based on the application, we distinguish between dif-
ferent types of the communication. This distinction allows us
to use directional antennas in order to spatially separate these
communications and therefore reduce the mutual interference
between normal vehicles and the platoon. Furthermore, the
directional antennas method is further enhanced by employing
a reduce packet collisions between e-platoon members.
II. C OMMUNICATION FOR V EHICULAR P LATOONING
In our design, we divide the communications between
vehicles into three categories:
A. Communication between normal vehicles
In Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET), vehicles ex-
change local dynamic information e.g. position, speed, heading
with their neighbors to create awareness about the environment
and the surrounding vehicles. To enable this awareness, the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has
standardized the transmission of periodic one-hop broadcast
CAM messages with constant transmission power [3]. In
previous work [11], Kloiber et al. proposed a novel protocol
for transmissions of CAMs in normal traffic scenarios. The
authors propose to increase the awareness quality by randomly
selecting the TX power for each CAM transmission and
vehicle. This means, that each vehicle controls its current
transmission power by using a certain probability distribution
over a valid transmission power interval. Their protocol shows
also a significant reduction of the congestion on the commu-
nication channel. For the aforementioned benefits, we use this
protocol. In our work we use the random transmission power
protocol for transmitting CAMs between normal vehicles to
support basic safety-related applications.
B. Communication between normal vehicles and platoon ve-
hicles
In this communication type, platoon and normal vehicles
exchange CAM messages. E-platoon members exchange their
status information according to communication protocol for
e-platoon vehicles (will be presented later in this section).
Some vehicles in the e-platoon play the role of communication
gateways between e-platoon vehicles and normal vehicles. The
gateway vehicles transmit the overall status information of
the whole e-platoon to the normal vehicles in a single CAM.
Hence, from the normal vehicles point of view, the e-platoon
is seen as a single vehicle.
Depending on the length of the e-platoon, one or more
vehicles in the e-platoon will be assigned the gateway role. In a
short e-platoon, only the leader is the gateway node. In a long
e-platoon, leader and the tail vehicle are the gateway nodes.
In case of very long e-platoon, a vehicle in the middle will be
also a gateway node. In comparison with the non-cooperative
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approach, the communication overhead from e-platoon vehi-
cles to normal vehicles in the cooperative approach is reduced.
C. Communication between platoon vehicles
The requirement on the communication between the pla-
toon members is much higher than the one between normal
vehicles. Specifically, the CAM messages update rate can
be as high as 40Hz, which corresponds to a communication
cycle of 25 ms [12]. The exact requirement of the message
rate will depend on the inter-vehicle distance of the platoon
and the motion controller design. Generally, the smaller the
inter-vehicle distance is, the higher the message rate must
be. However, the carrier sense multiple access with collision
avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism, which utilized in IEEE
802.11p, shows poor performance with relatively high packet
loss and average delay [13].
III. P ROPOSED P ROTOCOL
To design an inter-platoon communication protocol based on
transmissions on the CCH of ITS-G5A, two important issues
must be taken into account:
1) Communication between e-platoon vehicles causes inter-
ference to the communication between normal vehicles
and vice versa, especially in a dense traffic scenario.
2) Packet collisions between the e-platoon vehicles.
To handle these issues, we propose the following:
A. Directional Antenna
To solve the interference problem, we propose to use an
additional transceiver with a directional antenna to spatially
separate the communication between e-platoon vehicles and
other type of communications. Thus, the two types of com-
munication can occur at the same time. Each e-platoon vehicle
will be equipped with two radio transceivers: One with omni-
directional antennas for communication with normal vehicles
and one with directional antennas for intra-platoon commu-
nication. The reason for choosing this design is based on
two observations. First, the data exchanged between e-platoon
vehicles is irrelevant to the normal vehicles. Second, vehicles
in the e-platoon drive in a line. Each vehicle is only interested
in messages from other vehicles in front or from behind.
This allows the usage of directional antennas. In our proposal,
bidirectional antennas with one beam pointing to the front and
one beam pointing to the back are used (see Fig. 2). This kind
of antennas can be realized by combining two single-beam
directional antenna elements. Furthermore, in order to ensure
the alignment of the antenna beams between transmitter and
receiver during driving in a curve, the antenna beams can be
electronically or mechanically steered. Implementation details,
however, are out of the scope of this work.
B. Transmission Scheduling Scheme
To reduce the packet collisions between the e-platoon ve-
hicles, we propose to use an application-level deterministic
distributed scheduling scheme. It is a reactive message sending
protocol, in which the leader of the e-platoon transmits status
 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC): Workshop: 2nd
International Workshop on Vehicular Networking and Intelligent Transportation systems (VENITS'16)
Fig. 2. Bidirectional antennas used for intra-platoon communication.
messages periodically with a pre-defined transmission interval
T . Then, each vehicle calculates its own offset based on the
sending time of the leader. Our scheme is different from
the algorithm proposed in [10], in our protocol, each vehicle
schedules its next message at a time-offset after it receives a
message from the preceding vehicle. τ is calculated from the
transmission interval divided and the size of the platoon S as
follow:
T
τ= . (1)
S
In other words, the leader sends its CAM first, then followed
by others (see Fig. 3) Moreover, even if a vehicle didn’t receive
a message from the preceding vehicle due to collision or
any other reason, the vehicle will still transmit its message
after one transmission interval from its last transmission. This
(a) Without scheduling
(b) With scheduling
Fig. 3. Transmission scheme with and without scheduling.
sequential transmission in a round-robin manner prevents the
unnecessary channel contention between platoon members. As
a result, the number of message collisions between platoon
vehicles will be reduced.
C. Beam Switching
For further enhancement, we exploit the round-robin manner
by dynamically switch on and off the front-beam and back-
beam according to which vehicle is transmitting. However, to
achieve the dynamic switching, synchronization between e-
platoon vehicles is required. In our work, we assume that the
synchronization can be achieved with GPS or GNSS. Under
synchronization and the transmission scheduling, each node
will know which node transmits at which time. In principle, a
synchronization event for intra-platoon message transmission
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will be implemented at each vehicle. The transmit time point
for the k th vehicle in the platoon will be τk seconds after the
synchronization event. The τk value can be calculated from
the position of the vehicle in the e-platoon, the transmission
interval and the platoon size as follow:
τk = (k − 1) × τ . (2)
Each node turns off the back-beam if the current transmitter
is a preceding platoon member and turn off the front-beam
if the current transmitter is a following platoon member. The
dynamic turning on and off the antenna beams will reduce
the interference level from normal vehicles in the opposite
direction of the current arriving signal. Since the vehicles in
the platoon transmit sequentially from the front to the back,
beam switching mechanism is quite simple. Each vehicle will
turn off the back beam at the time the leading vehicle transmits
until it is its turn to transmit. After that, it turns off the front-
beam and turn on the back-beam.
IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
We evaluate the performance of our proposed communi-
cation protocol for the e-platooning application via computer
simulations. We use OMNeT++ [14] for modeling the com-
munication network and SUMO [15] as a traffic simulator.
To creates a bidirectional communication between SUMO and
OMNeT++, we use VEINS framework [16].
A. Simulation Scenario
We consider e-platooning in a highway scenario. The traffic
set up as shown in Fig. 4 has been simulated. The scenario
consists of an 8-lane highway 10km long section with 4 lanes
in each direction. For each direction, there are three lanes for
normal vehicles and one most left lane for e-platoon vehicles.
For the normal lanes, the maximum allowed speed on each
lane (from right to left in each direction) is 32 m/s, 36 m/s,
and 40 m/s respectively. The maximum allowed speed of the
e-platoon lane is 36 m/s. In our simulations, we simulated
only one e-platoon consisting of 10 vehicles. They drive at the
speed of 36 m/s. The inter-vehicle distance is set to 5 m. The
length of the vehicle is 5 m. Only data from the middle part
of the highway has been collected for analysis to avoid edge
effects, i.e. only transmissions and receptions carried out when
transmitter and receiver are situated in the section between
1500 m and 8500 m have been analyzed.
Fig. 4. Mixed traffic scenario where red vehicles are e-platoon vehicles and
yellow vehicles are normal vehicles.
The parameter set that has been used for simulations and
the protocol settings that we considered are shown in Table
I. Moreover, to show how the proposed directional antenna,
transmission scheduling, and beam switching in our protocol
 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC): Workshop: 2nd
International Workshop on Vehicular Networking and Intelligent Transportation systems (VENITS'16)

enhance the performance of the platoon communication, we C. Simulation Results

evaluated the performance of different protocols with different Fig. 5(a) shows the CCDF of the average update delay
combination of these technologies as shown in Table II. All between all pairs of vehicles in the e-platoon for the case
these protocols are compared against each others and against of a 40 Hz update rate. According to the result, the baseline
the baseline protocol which employs the traditional CAM protocol has the worst performance for update delay greater
broadcasting The performance of each protocol is evaluated or equal to 100 ms. The Type I protocol II, which uses only
in both 25 Hz and 40 Hz update rate. In order to ensure transmission scheduling, achieves better performance than
that statistically significant results are obtained, each member the baseline protocol. However, the Type II protocol, when
of the platoon transmits 7000 CAM messages and 13000 directional antennas are used but no transmission scheduling,
CAM messages when the update rate is 25 Hz and 40 Hz has worse performance than Type I. With Type III and Type IV,
respectively. when both directional antennas and transmission scheduling
are used, better performance than that of Type I or II is
TABLE I
S IMULATION PARAMETERS
achieved. The difference of the performance between Type
III and Type IV is small. For these types, the probability
Parameter Value that update delay exceeds 100 ms is less than 4 × 10−5 .
Traffic density 1000 vehicles/hour/lane
CAM length 400 Bytes
By comparing this performance with the baseline protocol
CAM rate 10 Hz performance, we notice that an improvement of factor 7 is
CAM priority AC VI achieved. The gap of the performance between the considered
Platoon message length 400 Bytes
Platoon message rate 40 Hz, 25 Hz (depending on simulations) 100
Channel model simple free-space pathloss model with baseline
pathloss exponent 2.2 Type I
Carrier sense threshold -85 dBm 10-1 Type II
Noise power -93 dBm Type III

P(updateDelay > t)
Transmit Power Random Transmit Power, uniform distribution, Type IV
max 33 dBm, min 4 dBm for normal vehicles. 10-2
20 dBm for e-platoon vehicles [11].
Transmission rate 6 Mbps
Antenna gain Omni-directional: 0 dB 10-3
Bidirectional: 10 dB, 30◦ -HPBW
BER, PER Measurement based model provided in VEINS
10-4

TABLE II 10-5 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200

P ROTOCOLS t (ms)
Protocol Directional antenna scheduling Beam switching (a) Average
Baseline No No No
Type I No Yes No 100
baseline
Type II Yes No No Type I
Type III Yes Yes No
10-1 Type II
Type IV Yes Yes Yes Type III
P(updateDelay > t)

Type IV
10-2
B. Performance metric
In order to evaluate our proposed protocol for inter-platoon 10-3
communication a suitable performance metric is required. The
traditional End-to-end (E2E) delay and Packet Delivery Ratio
10-4
(PDR) only provide average values over time. Hence, they
do not consider the up-to-dateness of the current position
awareness nor the correlation between subsequent transmis- 10-5 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200
sions/receptions. The Update Delay (UD) [11] is defined t (ms)
as the time elapsed between two consecutive successfully (b) At tail vehicle in platoon from leading vehicle
received messages from a specific TX at a specific RX. It is
Fig. 5. CCDF of update delay performance in e-platoon with message rate
approximately a multiple of the transmission interval T with of 40 Hz
a small variation due to the E2E delay. To visualize the UD,
we chose the complementary cumulative distribution function protocols is bigger when we consider only the update delay of
(CCDF), which corresponds to the probability of exceeding the leading vehicle message at the tail vehicle in the platoon, at
a specific value of the UD. For a specific application one which the worst performance is expected due to the distance.
can define a requirement that a UD x is not exceeded with Here, the advantage of having directional antennas is clearly
a probability of y. shown in Fig. 5(b). Type II, III, and IV protocols perform

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 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC): Workshop: 2nd
International Workshop on Vehicular Networking and Intelligent Transportation systems (VENITS'16)

far better than the other two protocols. It can be seen that,
the difference of the average update delay and the update
delay at the tail for Type IV protocol is very small. While for
other protocols, there is a bigger gap between them. The better
performance of Type IV is due to the usage of synchronization
and the dynamic switching of the antenna beams. Both Type
III and Type IV manage to achieve the probability that update
delay exceeds 100 ms smaller than 10−4 . For update delay of
100 ms, an improvement of factor 50 is achieved with Type
III and IV protocols compared with the baseline protocol.
When we consider the lower e-platoon message rate of 25
Hz, the difference of the performance between the protocols is
more obvious in Fig. 6. For a platoon of size 10, each vehicle
will have approximately 4 ms to accomplish its transmission
for a platoon message rate of 25 Hz while only 2.5 ms for a
message rate of 40 Hz. Due to the longer time and less channel
contention, each vehicle has a higher probability to finish its
transmission successfully.
100
10-1
P(updateDelay > t)
transmission scheduling approach and directional antennas we
can spatially separate the communication between e-platoon
vehicles and normal vehicles. Furthermore, we have employed
a dynamic beam switching to reduce interference. The quality
of transmissions between the platoon vehicles is improved
with a factor of 7 for high e-platoon message rate and 50 for
low platoon message rate compared with the case without our
proposed protocols. Most notably is the great improvement of
the update delay performance between the leading vehicle and
the vehicles at the end of the platoon, which is very important
in order to ensure the stability of the e-platoon.
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V. C ONCLUSION Transactions on Mobile Computing, no. 1, pp. 3–15, 2010.
In this work, we have proposed a new protocol for inter-
platoon communication based on ITS-G5A system in mixed
traffic environment. By exploiting a distributed deterministic

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