CUBA: Chained Unanimous Byzantine Agreement for Decentralized Platoon Management

Autonomous driving, vehicle platoons and smart traffic management will dramatically improve our transportation systems. In contrast to centralized approaches, which do not scale efficiently with the actual traffic load, a decentralized traffic management based on distributed consensus could provide a robust, fair and well-scaling solution for infrastructures of variable density.In this paper, we propose a distributed platoon management scheme, where platoon operations such as join or merge are decided by consensus over a Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET).Since conventional consensus protocols are not suitable for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as platoons, we introduce CUBA, a new validated and verifiable consensus protocol especially tailored to platoons, which considers their special communication topology.We demonstrate that CUBA only introduces a small communication overhead compared to the centralized, Leader-based approach and significantly outperforms related distributed approaches.