Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for a Platooning System

This paper describes a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2 V) communication system that is developed in the SARTRE project. The project vision is to develop and integrate technology that enables vehicles to drive in platoons. SARTRE defines a platoon (or road train) as a collection of vehicles where a manually driven heavy lead vehicle is followed by several automatically controlled (both laterally and longitudinally) following trucks and/or passenger cars. The V2 V communication system enables forwarding of messages between vehicles to share data such as vehicle speed. In this paper, we present performance measurements of a first prototype of the V2 V system. This is an important part of the platooning demonstrator that is being developed in the SARTRE project. We evaluate two antenna placements on the lead vehicle; in front on the driver cabin and in the rear on top of the container. Our results show that the rear placement provides superior results, especially for distances above 70 meters.