A Comparative Study of Stationary and Dynamic Vehicular Micro Clouds: A Case of Vehicle Platooning for Incident Management

Vehicular communication enables advanced incident management to overcome non-recurrent disruptions and severe congestion. While traditional stationary vehicular clouds, fixed to roadside infrastructure are innovative, they could experience extensive data traffic and infrastructure communication delays. Dynamic vehicular clouds could provide a promising solution to overcome these challenges to reduce communication latency through cooperative message dissemination whilst maintaining stable vehicle maneuvers. This study offers a comparative performance analysis of freeway incident management, using speed and lane-changing advisories, deployed with stationary and platoon-based dynamic vehicular micro clouds (VMCs). The system-level communication features, driving safety, and vehicular mobility are measured to evaluate the efficacy of both systems under incident-induced traffic management. The communication latency and packet loss ratio of the stationary cloud is on average 6.2% and 4.8% higher than those of the dynamic clouds, respectively. In addition, the dynamic cloud shows advantages in reducing travel time delay and risk of collisions, even at high connected vehicle penetration rates. Our work also aims to highlight the novel communication features of cellular technologies (4G LTE, 5G), that could reduce communication delay and interference with the deployment of advanced traffic management strategies. The research sets a foundation to deploy novel vehicle communication architectures while quantifying the advantages of vehicular clouds for managing freeway traffic.