Analysis of Communication Requirements for CACC in Stop-and-Go Behavior for Energy Efficient Driving

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs) nowadays suffer from range anxiety due to their short driving range and long battery recharging time. One solution to mitigate range anxiety problem is by reducing the unnecessary stop-and-go events to reduce energy consumption. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is one of the Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) applications that can provide safe and smooth driving. In VANETs, all vehicles share their state information periodically by transmitting Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) to their neighbors using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. CACC exploits the state information of the neighboring vehicles to operate adaptive and energy efficient maneuver. To satisfy the CACC requirements, vehicles need to provide sufficient and accurate information. The precision of this information is highly dependent on the update rate of CAMs and on their communication range. High update rate and communication range can cause channel congestion and increase packet collisions. The focus in this paper is to determine the required update rate and communication range that satisfy the requirements of the CACC to reduce the energy consumption for EVs. Simulation results also show the benefit of using CACC on the energy consumption.