A Performance Study of Mobility Speed Effects on Vehicle Following Control via V2V MIMO Communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are important for intelligent transportation system (ITS) development for driving safety, traffic efficiency, and the development of autonomous vehicles. V2V communication channels, environments, mobility patterns, and mobility speed significantly affect the accuracy of autonomous vehicle control. In this paper, we propose a versatile system-level framework that can be used for investigation, experimentation, and verification to expedite the development of autonomous vehicles. Once vehicle functionality, communication channels, and driving scenarios were modelled, experiments with different mobility speeds and communication channels were set up to measure the communication quality and the effects on the vehicle’s following control. In our experiment, the leader vehicle was set to travel through a high-building environment with a constant speed of 36 km/h and suddenly changed lanes in front of the follower vehicle. The speed of the follower vehicle ranged from 40 km/h to 80 km/h. The experimental results show that the quality of single-input and single-output (SISO) communication is less efficient than multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) communication. The quality of SISO communication between vehicles with a speed difference of 4 km/h (leader 36 km/h and follower 40 km/h) had a link quality worse than 0.85, which caused unstable control in the follower vehicle speed. However, it was also found that if the speed of the follower vehicle increased to 80 km/h, the link quality of SISO communication was better, close to 0.95, due to the decreased distance between the vehicles, resulting in better control. Moreover, it was found that the impact of SISO communication can be overcome by using the MIMO communication technique and selecting the best input signal at each time. MIMO communication has less signal loss, allowing the follower vehicle to make correct decisions throughout the movement.