Correlations between network conditions and quality of CACC systems in terms of safety, efficiency and channel utilization

This thesis reviews approaches towards Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), identifies important simulation parameters, and analyzes their correlation with metrics that describe the performance of the application in terms of safety, efficiency and channel utilization. This is achieved through simulation of realistic traffic and V2V communication by using recent ETSI ITS standards including different GeoNetworking message dissemination mechanisms. The results show, that an increasing traffic on the network channel has a negative effect on the safety of a platooning application, but it can be compensated by using more conservative configuration parameters. This impact is increasing slightly for lower vehicle spacing, stronger for longer platoons and drastically for lower beacon rates.