Controlling Communications Quality in V2V Platooning: a TSN-like Slot-Based Scheduler Approach

Connected vehicles, facilitated by Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, play a key role in enhancing road safety and traffic efficiency. However, V2V communications primarily rely on wireless protocols, such as Wi-Fi, that require additional collision avoidance mechanisms to better ensure bounded latency and reliability in critical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the challenge of message collision in V2V platooning through a slotted-based solution inspired by Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), which is gaining momentum for in-vehicle networks. To this end, we present a controller, named TSNCtl, operating at the application level of the vehicular communications stack. TSNCtl employs a finite state machine (FSM) to manage platoon formation and slot-based scheduling for message dissemination. The reported evaluation results, based on the OMNeT++ simulation framework and INET library, demonstrate the effectiveness of TSNCtl in reducing packet collisions across various scenarios. Specifically, our experiments reveal a significant reduction in packet collisions compared to the CSMA-CA baseline used in traditional Wi-Fi-based protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11p): for instance, with slot lengths of 2 ms, our solution achieves an average collision rate under 1%, compared to up to 50% for the baseline case.