Cooperation with Disagreement Correction in the Presence of Communication Failures

Abstract: Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is a fundamental requirement in cooperative vehicular systems to achieve high performance while keeping high safety standards. Vehicles periodically exchange critical information with nearby vehicles to determine their maneuvers according to the information quality and established strategies. However, wireless communication is prone to failures. Thus, participants can be unaware that other participants have not received the information on time resulting in conflicting trajectories that may not be safe. We present a deterministic solution that allows all participants to use a default strategy when other participants have not received on time the complete information. We base our solution on a timed distributed protocol that adapts its output according to the effect of message omission failures so that the disagreement period occurs for no longer than a constant time (of the order of milliseconds) that only depends on the message delay. We formally show the correctness and perform experiments to corroborate its efficiency. We explain how the proposed solution can be used on vehicular platooning to attain high performance and still guarantee high safety standards despite communication failures. We believe that this work can facilitate the implementation of cooperative driving systems that have to deal with inherent (communication) uncertainties.