Impact of Communication Erasure Channels on the Safety of Highway Vehicle Platoons

Packet loss in block erasure channels creates a randomly switching networked system that impacts control performance significantly. This paper employs safety of highway vehicle platoons as a platform to study such an impact. By autonomous intervehicle coordination, a platoon can potentially enhance safety, improve highway utility, increase fuel economy, and reduce emission. By comparing different information structures that utilize radar distance sensors and wireless communication channels, we characterize some intrinsic relationships between communication resources and control performance. The findings of this paper provide useful guidelines in communication resource allocations and vehicle coordination in vehicle safety problems.