Latency and Reliability of mmWave Multi-Hop V2V Communications Under Relay Selections

Timely and reliable information sharing among autonomous vehicles (AVs) provides a promising approach for reducing traffic congestion and improving traffic efficiency in future intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we consider millimeter-wave (mmWave) based multi-hop vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to facilitate ultra-reliable low-latency information sharing among AVs. We propose a novel framework for performance analysis and design of relay selection schemes in mmWave multi-hop V2V communications, while taking into account the mmWave signal propagation characteristics, road topology, and traffic conditions. In particular, considering the minimum tracking distance requirement of road traffic, the headway, i.e., the distance between adjacent AVs, is modeled as shifted-exponential distribution. Moreover, we model the communication path losses using the Manhattan distance metric in the taxicab geometry, which can more accurately capture the characteristics of mmWave signal propagation in urban grid roads than conventional Euclidean distance geometry. Based on the proposed model, we investigate the latency and reliability of mmWave multi-hop V2V communications for three widely adopted relay selection schemes, i.e., random with forward progress (RFP), most forward with fixed radius (MFR), and nearest with forward progress (NFP), respectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel relay selection scheme for joint optimization of the single-hop forward progress (FP) and single-hop latency according to the AVs’ instantaneous locations and an estimate of the residual multi-hop latency. Simulation results show that, by balancing the current single-hop latency and the residual multi-hop latency for the multi-hop V2V network, the proposed relay selection scheme significantly outperforms the MFR, NFP and RFP in both multi-hop transmission latency and reliability of mmWave V2V communications.