Leader Election in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Based Platooning

With the advancement of Vehicular Ad-hoc Network and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) system, vehicle platooning has become feasible. The performance of the CACC based platoon highly depends upon the maneuver performed by its leader vehicle because its actions have a direct implication on follower vehicles in the platoon. The leader vehicle plays a significant role in intra-platoon coordination, synchronization, collision avoidance and path planning. Thus, an election of the most appropriate, trusted and best entity to take the role of a leader in a CACC platooning becomes crucial. For efficient and safe functionality of this system, leader election has to be fair to every vehicle and should assign leader with the consensus of the whole platoon. To this end, very few contributions are available. In this paper, we suggest an incentive strategy and propose an architecture and leader election mechanism to elect the best leader of the platoon efficiently.