Platooning on the edge

Platooning of cars or trucks is one of the most relevant applications of autonomous driving, since it has the potential to greatly improve efficiency in road utilization and fuel consumption. Traditional proposals of vehicle platooning were based on distributed architectures with computation on board platoon vehicles and direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications (or Dedicated Short Range Communication - DSRC), possibly with the support of roadside units. However, with the introduction of the 5G technology and of computing elements at the edge of the network, according to the multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm, the possibility emerges of a centralized control of platoons through MEC, with several significant advantages with respect to the V2V approach. For this reason, in this paper we investigate the feasibility of vehicle platooning in a centralized scenario where the control of vehicle speed and acceleration is managed by the network through its MEC facilities, possibly with a platooning-as-a-service (PaaS) paradigm. Using a detailed simulator, we show that, with realistic values of latency and packet loss probability, large platoons can be effectively controlled by MEC hosts.