Joint Fuel-Efficient Vehicle Platooning and Data Transmission Scheduling for MEC-Enabled Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems

Platoon-based connected vehicles have recently received increasing attention from academia and industry since they are considered promising solutions to transform our mobility society into the next generation. Vehicular communication and platoon coordination are two aspects of enabling technologies for mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled cooperative vehicle-infrastructure systems (CVIS), while few efforts have incorporated these two dimensions into a joint implementation framework. In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint car-following coordination and data transmission scheduling of vehicle platoons. We develop a two-tier hierarchical framework for vehicle platooning: a fuel-efficient mobility optimization layer for car-following coordination and a reliable vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication layer for data transmission scheduling. Specifically, we present a platoon-based fuel consumption minimization model and a car-following control protocol to derive fuel-efficient control inputs. We also propose a reliability-oriented and delay-constrained data transmission scheduling model that is driven by upper-layer car-following coordination. We derived a closed-form expression for the reliability-optimal data transmission scheduling solution, which incorporates platoon mobility, channel characteristics, and application requirements. With simulations, we show that our joint method improves fuel efficiency and communication reliability for platooning vehicles. In particular, the proposed method reduces the platoon's fuel consumption per time slot by 16.4%, meanwhile making the communication reliability 1.31 times higher than other traditional methods.