Vehicle platooning is a cooperative driving technology that can be supported by 5G enhanced Vehicle-to-Everything (eV2X) communication to improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and reduce fuel consumption. eV2X communication among the platoon vehicles involves the periodic exchange of Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) containing vehicle information under strict latency and reliability requirements. These requirements can be maintained by administering the assignment of resources, in terms of time slots and frequency bands, for CAM exchanges in a platoon, with the help of a resource allocation mechanism. State-of-the-art on control and communication design for vehicle platoons either consider a simplified platoon model with a detailed communication architecture or consider a simplified communication delay model with a detailed platoon control system. Departing from existing works, we have developed a comprehensive vehicle platoon communication and control framework using OMNET++, the benchmarking network simulation tool. We have carried out an inclusive and comparative study of three different platoon Information Flow Topologies (IFTs), namely Car-to-Server, Multi-Hop, and One-Hop over 5G using the Predecessor-leader following platoon control law to arrive at the best-suited IFT for platooning. Secondly, for the best-suited 5G eV2X platooning IFT selected, we have analyzed the performance of three different resource allocation algorithms, namely Maximum of Carrier to Interference Ratio (MaxC/I), Proportional Fair (PF), and Deficit Round Robin (DRR). Exhaustive system-level simulations show that the One-Hop information flow strategy along with the MaxC/I resource allocation yields the best Quality of Service (QoS) performance, in terms of latency, reliability, Age of Information (AoI), and throughput.

翻译：车辆编队是一种协同驾驶技术，可通过5G增强型车联万物（eV2X）通信予以支持，以提升道路安全、交通效率并降低燃油消耗。编队车辆间的eV2X通信涉及在严格时延与可靠性要求下周期性交换包含车辆信息的协同感知消息（CAM）。借助资源分配机制，通过为编队内的CAM交换分配时隙与频段资源，可维持这些性能要求。现有关于车辆编队控制与通信设计的研究，要么采用简化的编队模型配合详尽的通信架构，要么采用简化的通信时延模型配合详尽的编队控制系统。不同于现有工作，我们利用基准网络仿真工具OMNET++构建了一个综合的车辆编队通信与控制框架。我们采用前车跟随编队控制律，对三种不同的编队信息流拓扑（IFT）——即基于5G的车-服务器、多跳与单跳拓扑——进行了全面比较研究，以确定最适合编队应用的IFT。其次，针对选出的最优5G eV2X编队IFT，我们分析了三种不同资源分配算法的性能，包括最大载干比（MaxC/I）、比例公平（PF）以及赤字轮询（DRR）。详尽的系统级仿真表明，在时延、可靠性、信息新鲜度（AoI）和吞吐量等服务质量（QoS）指标上，单跳信息流策略结合MaxC/I资源分配能提供最优性能。