Vehicle platooning is a perspective technique for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) use dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) to form a convoy, in which the following vehicles can receive the information from their preceding vehicles to achieve safe automated driving and maintain a short headway. Consequently, a vehicle platoon can improve traffic safety and efficiency, further reducing fuel consumption. However, emergency braking inevitably occurs when the platoon meets an accident or a sudden mechanical failure. It is more critical when the wireless communication got delays. Therefore, "how to predefine a minimum safe distance (MSD) considering communication delay" is a challenging issue. To this end, a series of field tests were carried out to measure the communication delay of IEEE 802.11p that is the underlying protocol of DSRC. Subsequently, MSD is modeled and analyzed when the platoon travels at accelerating, cruising, and decelerating states. More importantly, the results of field tests are applied in the models to investigate the impact of communication delay on MSD in practice. The simulation results verify that the proposed model can effectively maintain the platooning vehicles' safety even if emergency braking happens with certain communication delays.
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