Better Platooning Control Toward Autonomous Driving : An LTE Device-to-Device Communications Strategy That Meets Ultralow Latency Requirements

Platooning is the first step toward fully autonomous driving, which is deemed as one of the most representative fifth-generation (5G) use cases. Spacing and speed in a platoon of vehicles are regulated by a fully automated control system that relies on updated vehicles? kinematics data. In this article, we investigate the potential of long-term evolution (LTE) device-todevice (D2D) communications for data dissemination in the platoon. Exploiting pooled LTE resources and the coordination by the in-front vehicle of the platoon, the proposed solution is shown to fulfill the ultralow latency requirements of messaging in the platoon. As a further advantage, our proposal is able to provide spatial reuse of LTE resources among members of the same platoon and of different platoons, thus drastically reducing the capacity demand.