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A Resilient and Scalable Flocking Scheme in Autonomous Vehicular Networks

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Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) is emerging as a highly promising technology, which aims to provide road safety, environment protection and personal-oriented services. The vehicle ad hoc wireless communications form an indispensable part of truly ubiquitous communications networking. VANET is formed by spontaneously moving autonomous vehicles with the self-organization and self-management capability. In this paper, we focus on the decentralized coordination of multiple unmanned vehicles such that they can freely move and adaptively cooperate in a complex environment. During this procedure, flocking is one of the key operations and requirements. Here, flocking refers to the formation and maintenance of a desired pattern by a group of mobile vehicles without collision during movement. We propose a resilient and scalable flocking scheme for a group of vehicles, which follows the leader–followers moving pattern. In the absence of obstacles, a collision avoidance algorithm is presented to maintain a desired distance among vehicles. This will ensure information completeness and is significant in certain mission critical situations without collision between a unmanned vehicle and its neighboring vehicles. In the presence of obstacles in an environment, this algorithm is able to avoid collision between a vehicle and its neighbor (either a neighboring vehicle or a neighboring obstacle). Theoretical proof has been presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the algorithm to guarantee collision-free. In addition, with increasing number of vehicles, the performance of the proposed flocking scheme performs without increasing the processing overhead, which demonstrates the desirable scalability.

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Notes

  1. In the rest of the paper, if unspecified, vehicle refers to unmanned vehicle.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award under Grant No. CCF-0545667. We would like to thank many colleagues and anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and helpful suggestions for improving the overall quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Naixue Xiong & Yingshu Li

  2. Depa. of Comp. and Teleco. Engi., University of Western Macedonia, Kozani, Greece

    Athanasios V. Vasilakos

  3. Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Laurence T. Yang

  4. Depa. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta Edmonton, Edmonton, Canada

    Witold Pedrycz

  5. Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Fornebu, 1325, Norway

    Yan Zhang

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  1. Naixue Xiong
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  2. Athanasios V. Vasilakos
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  5. Yan Zhang
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Correspondence to Naixue Xiong.

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Xiong, N., Vasilakos, A.V., Yang, L.T. et al. A Resilient and Scalable Flocking Scheme in Autonomous Vehicular Networks. Mobile Netw Appl 15, 126–136 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-009-0168-3

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