Autonomous Platoon Formation
for VANET-Enabled Vehicles
Dongliang Su
Department of Computer Science
University of Seoul
Seoul, Korea
darrelsu@naver.com
Abstract—Platooning is an important mechanism to increase the
capacity of roads and the efficiency of driving. Vehicular ad hoc
networks (VANETs) can enhance the performance of platoons. In
this paper, a novel mechanism that selects a leader vehicle
autonomously for a platoon based on relative mobility
information of vehicles is proposed for overcoming the restriction
on vehicles and for facilitating platoons. For the performance
evaluation of our proposed mechanism, the network simulator
NS-3 is utilized. The effectiveness of our mechanism is shown by
the simulation results such as improved highway capacity.1
Keywords— VANET, ITS, platoon, leader selection.
I. INTRODUCTION
For the purpose of driverless vehicles, an intelligent
transportation systems (ITS) technology called the automated
highway system (AHS) has been proposed. AHS is designed
to realize the autonomous cruise and the control of vehicles
and the automation of traffic management and accident
treatment, and to improve the safety and efficiency of highway
system. Grouping vehicles into a platoon can improve traffic
efficiency, capacity of roads and safety of vehicles [1]. A
platoon is composed of a leader vehicle and one or more
follower vehicles which travel under the control of AHS [2].
In order to promote platoons, the vehicle control technology
has been designed to make platooning feasible for automated
vehicles in wireless communication, such as the cooperative
adaptive cruise control (CACC) [3] and the vehicular ad hoc
network (VANET) [4]. The reduced distance between vehicles
can be acquired through the CACC system. VANETs allow a
vehicle to exchange data with neighbor vehicles with no or
little help of infrastructure. VANET can assist the formation
and the maintenance of a platoon.
In general, a platoon leader vehicle is a truck or bus driven
by a professional driver and a platoon tends to be formed for
the purpose of carrier business. But it is difficult to create a
1
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. NRF-
2015R1A2A2A04005646).
This research was supported by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and
Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research
Center) support program (IITP-2016-H8501-16-1007) supervised by the IITP
(Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion).
*
corresponding author
978-1-5090-1325-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
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Sanghyun Ahn*
Department of Computer Science
University of Seoul
Seoul, Korea
ahn@uos.ac.kr
platoon due to the low density of heavy vehicles. On the other
hand, civilian vehicles may profit from platooning technology
for creating more platoons to improve traffic efficiency if
many cars are installed with the technology, whereas carriers
can only profit immediately once there are the heavy vehicles
equipped with the platooning technology.
In our paper, we propose an autonomous platoon leader
selection (APLS) mechanism which autonomously selects a
vehicle as a platoon leader without the help of the AHS
infrastructure in order to overcome the restriction of only a
specific truck or bus being selected as a platoon leader. This
mechanism utilizes the velocity and positions of all
neighboring vehicles to select a stable leader vehicle for
creating a stable platoon structure. Moreover, our mechanism
can quickly identify the platoons and accelerate the platoon
formation. By our mechanism, the road capacity is increased
and the fuel consumption is decreased meanwhile the
travelling time is reduced. For vehicles in this system, it is a
challenge for driving efficiently responding to changing
circumstances according to local information.
In the rest of the paper, we will take a brief look at the
previous work done on platoon formation in Section II.
Section III describes the detailed operation of our proposed
mechanism. In Section IV, we evaluate the performance of our
mechanism and analyze the simulation results. Finally, Section
V concludes this paper.
II. RELATED WORK
There has been some research work done on vehicle
platooning.
In [5] and [6], the leader vehicle of a platoon continuously
provides follower vehicles with the information from AHS
and platoon maneuvers. In [5], a platoon can be composed of
both heavy vehicles, e.g. trucks or busses, and passenger
vehicles. In the AHS architecture of [6], vehicles are
organized into platoons with closely spaced, and the selection
and the maneuver of a platoon leader are under the control of
AHS.
In [7], a disturbance-adaptive platoon architecture is
proposed in order to adapt to the disturbance scenario by using
a platoon controller. And it considers dynamics requirements
of VANETs and platoons through VANETs. In this
247 ICTC 2016
 architecture, all platoon member vehicles adjust their speeds to
adapt to the influence of dynamic traffic circumstance. And a
driving strategy of the leader vehicle in a platoon is also
designed to mitigate the adverse impacts on traffic disturbance.
In this mechanism, the leader vehicle is designated and the
driving strategy can maintain a desired inter-platoon spacing.
In [8], a reactive clustering mechanism is proposed to solve
jams and move efficiently for the platooning robots (vehicles)
based on the adaptive cruise control (ACC) by using local
information among adjacent robots. In this mechanism, each
vehicle can determine to be clustered according to its
velocities and positions of preceding and following vehicles.
All the above-mentioned mechanisms do not have the
facility of selecting a leader vehicle autonomously and
organize a platoon without the restriction of only specific
vehicles. Hence, in this paper, we propose a mechanism to
select an autonomous platoon leader vehicle for all vehicles.
III. STABLE LEADER ELECTION FOR PLATOONING
We assume that a platoon moves on a designated lane and
other vehicles move on the other lanes. All vehicles can
frequently share their own local information using the
vehicular global positioning system (GPS) and all vehicles are
equipped with wireless communication units for building an
ad hoc network with other vehicles. A platoon includes a
leader vehicle which leads the platoon and one or more
follower vehicles which move tightly after the leader vehicle
as shown in Figure 1 [1].
Figure 1. A Group of vehicles in a platoon
In a VANET, vehicles exchange mobility information by
using beacon messages. When a platoon is created, a vehicle is
selected as a leader which is travelling ahead of others and is
of a stable velocity. It is determined by the suitability value
calculated according to the relative mobility information of the
neighbor of a vehicle.
Each vehicle X calculates the difference of its velocity from
the average velocity, vavg, of its neighbors. Also, it figures out
how far its position is to the average position, pavg, of all of its
neighbors. The normalized average relative velocity, V, is
calculated as the following:
(1)
(2)
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(3)
where n is the number of X's neighbor vehicles and vcurrent is
the current velocity of X. X calculates the standard deviation,
σv, of all of its neighbors in terms of velocity. Here, for the
sake of simplicity, we assume that the x and the y coordinates
of a vehicle are abstracted to the position of the vehicle. We
calculate pavg in the same way as the following:
(4)
The distance d from X to the average position of its
neighborhood is expressed as follows:
(5)
where pcurrent is the current position of X.
The smaller V is, the closer the velocity of X is to the
average velocity of its neighbors. The bigger d is, the more
ahead X travels. Finally, each vehicle calculates its suitability
value, W, as follows:
 =  ×   (6)
where 0 < α ≤ 1. The vehicle with the largest W value is
selected as the platoon leader. Each vehicle waits for a random
amount of time before sending a Leader Vehicle Announce
(LV_Announce) message. In the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol,
the distributed coordination function (DCF) controls the media
access using the mechanism of carrier sense multiple access
with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). A vehicle utilizes DCF
and W for the calculation of its timer value for an
LV_Announce message transmission:
(7)
where Dmax is the maximum transmission distance, W is the
value of the suitability metric. CWmin is the minimum
contention window sizes and CWmax is the maximum
contention window sizes.
When vehicles intend to create or join a platoon and enter a
designated lane, vehicles exchange the mobility information
through beacon messages. Each vehicle calculates its
suitability according to the information from a beacon
message. The vehicle selected as a platoon leader vehicle (LV)
periodically broadcasts Leader_Announcement messages to its
follower vehicles. The vehicle which is behind the leader
vehicle and receives the Leader_Announcement message can
join this platoon to be a follower vehicle (FV).
A vehicle ignores the Leader_Announcement message from
its backward leader vehicle. A leader vehicle can select a more
suitable leader to follow. In that case, two platoons may merge
 to one. If a follower vehicle receives more than one
Leader_Announcement messages from different vehicles, it
chooses the foremost leader vehicle as its leader. If a leader
vehicle wants to leave or give up its role, it sends a Leader_
Leave or Leader_Giveup message to its follower vehicles,
respectively. Figure 2 shows the procedure of platoon
formation.
If an LV or FV wants to stay in the platoon more, the speed
of the follower vehicles should be adjusted. A range of
technologies such as CACC are utilized to maintain platoons.
A constant-headway policy of the CACC system keeps a given
time headway between two neighbor vehicles in a platoon
according to the information which a preceding vehicle and a
leader vehicle provide. A vehicle adjusts its speed and
acceleration to the desired ones in order to maintain a platoon.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 2. Procedure of platoon formation (a) leader vehicle
selection, (b) platoon formation, (c) platoon merge
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In order to evaluate the performance of our mechanism, we
have used the NS-3 simulator [9]. The IEEE 802.11p standard
protocol is used for the vehicular wireless communications. It
uses 75 Mhz bandwidth on 5 GHz spectrum. We utilize the
WAVE short message protocol (WSMP) to send beacon
messages on one control channel. We simulated a 10km-long
single lane highway with the speed limit of 35m/s and the
mean speed of 30m/s for 500s. The data transmission rate is
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set to 6Mbps and the beacon interval to100ms. In order to
analyze the performance of platooning mechanisms, we have
used various transmission ranges. The transmission range is
varied from 60m to 200m.
We assume that all vehicles are platoon-enabled and intend
to join a platoon. The follower vehicles of a platoon move at
the same speed as that of their leader vehicle and the intra-
platoon distance (i.e., the inter-vehicle distance in a platoon) is
set to 10m. We have compared our APLS mechanism with the
distance-based reactive clustering method (DRCM) [8].
Because DRCM uses the mobility information in organizing
clusters like ours, we compared ours with DRCM.
We have measured the maximum lane capacity whose unit
is vehicles/lane/hr. In [10], the maximum lane capacity is
computed based on the average platoon size, AvgPlSize, in the
number of vehicles and is described in the following equation:
(9)
where v is the mean velocity (km/hr), h is the inter-vehicle
distance (m) in a platoon, s is the mean vehicle length (m) and
T is the minimum interval time (s) between two neighboring
platoons.
Figure 3 shows that our APLS gives larger average platoon
size than DRCM. In ours, as the transmission range increases,
the average platoon size also increases. A larger average
platoon size implies higher highway capacity.
Figure 31. Average platoon size vs. transmission range (with
100 vehicles)
Figure 4 shows the maximum lane capacity for various
transmission ranges. In this case, h, s, v and T are set to 10m,
4m, 108km/hr and 3s, respectively. APLS shows larger
maximum lane capacity than DRCM. The maximum lane
capacity can be increased up to 4500 vehicles/lane/hr when the
average platoon size is 8 vehicles and the transmission range is
200m.

Figure 4. Maximum lane capacity vs. transmission range
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a mechanism to select a platoon leader vehicle
using the relative mobility information was proposed. Here, a
vehicle autonomously decides to be a platoon leader without
the help of AHS. This mechanism considers the local
information of all neighboring vehicles for leader selection.
We implemented this mechanism with NS-3 and the
simulation results show the effectiveness of our mechanism
with increased highway capacity.
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