Age of Information Based Beacon Transmission for Reducing Status Update Delay in Platooning

Platooning is considered as a promising technology in the logistics industry since it can provide the benefits of raising fuel-efficiency and increasing road capacity. In platooning, vehicles automatically drive following a leader vehicle keeping a small inter-vehicle distance based on the shared status information via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Therefore, in order to ensure platoon safety and stability, other vehicles' status information must be timely updated and the platooning messages (i.e., beacons) should be reliably and timely exchanged. In this paper, we propose an age of information (AoI) based beacon transmission (AoIBT) scheme where vehicles request additional beacon transmissions with the consideration of AoI for reducing delay in updating other vehicles' status caused by beacon loss. Evaluation results demonstrate that AoIBT has significant performance improvement by up to 180% in various platoon environments compared with conventional schemes.