An empirical study of DSRC V2V performance in truck platooning scenarios

Among many safety applications enabled by Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), truck platooning provides many incentives to commercial companies. This paper studies DSRC Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) performance in truck platooning scenarios through real-world experiments. Commercial DSRC equipments and semi-trailer trucks are used in this study. We mount one DSRC antenna on each side of the truck. One set of dynamic tests and a few sets of static tests are conducted to explore DSRC behaviors under different situations. From the test results, we verified some of our speculations. For example, hilly roads can affect delivery ratio and antennas mounted on opposite sides of a truck can suffer from low delivery ratio at curved roads. In addition, we also found that antennas can sometimes suffer from low delivery ratio even when the trucks are on straight roads, possibly due to reflections from the nearby terrain. Fortunately, the delivery ratio can be greatly improved by using the two side antennas alternately.