Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Safety Enhancement via Dynamic Communication Channel Selection

Adding vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication into the adaptive cruise control (ACC) system produces the cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) with a reinforced road safety. However, current policy obliges safety-related data to be exchanged solely over the control channel (CCH) within the Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) spectrum, which may induce intolerable communication delay and higher accident risks. Standard countermeasures concentrate principally on adaptively adjusting transmission parameters. However, due to the limited network capacity of a single channel, these methods can hardly meet the real-time packet delivery requirement when vehicle density becomes high. Therefore, to ensure timely delivery of critical safety messages, this paper proposes instead a dynamic channel selection algorithm to fully exploit all the seven useable channels in the DSRC band. Experiments on a two-scaled-car platoon demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in reducing the vehicle CACC position and speed tracking errors.