Recouping Efficient Safety Distance in IoV-Enhanced Transportation Systems

Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) has the potentials of enhancing automatic driving in various transportation environment. However, there is very little investigation on quantifying the potential influence of automatic driving applications with the road efficiency in IoV. This paper studies the connection of safety distance to the road congestion under different IoV resource conditions. We propose an elastic wave equation model to reveal the relation between safety distance and road congestion. It can be found that the propagation speed of road congestion is largely affected by the safety distance. To recoup the efficient road safety and alleviate road congestion, an optimization problem is formulated with cooperative communication and computing via platoons that aims to minimize the total safety distance. Since the optimization is a complicated 0–1 programming problem, we propose a practical resource allocation algorithm and solve the problem through Lagrangian relaxation. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm leads to near-optimal results with low complexity but no overhead of vehicular information exchange.