Comparison of Communication Strategies for Maneuver Coordination of Highly Automated Vehicles

Abstract:
Highly automated vehicles will be able to manage traffic situations under certain conditions by themselves. This responsibility requires an accurate and complete understanding of the own status as well as the situation and behavior of all surrounding road users. Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication (V2V) can be used to exchange information between the vehicles to increase their individual knowledge about the current situation on the road. It can also be used to enable the automated vehicles to arrange their driving maneuvers in an efficient way. In this paper, we compare two strategies for the maneuver coordination. The first approach extends an existing message type, the Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) with the content for maneuver coordination. The second approach uses an independent message, the Maneuver Coordination Message (MCM), to exchange the maneuvering information between the road users. Both strategies were compared in term of channel usage, throughput and latency. The investigation was made by simulation of a highway scenario with different traffic densities. The approaches show significant distinct results in all investigated conditions.