Cooperative Driving and the Tactile Internet

The trend towards autonomous driving and the recent advances in vehicular networking led to a number of very successful proposals towards cooperative driving. Maneuvers can be coordinated among participating vehicles and controlled by means of wireless communications. One of the most challenging scenario or application in this context is Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) or platooning. When it comes to realizing safety gaps between the cars of less than 5m, very strong requirements on the communication system need to be satisfied. The underlying distributed control system needs regular updates of sensor information from the other cars in the order of about 10 Hz. This leads to message rates in the order of up to 10 kHz for large networks, which, given the possibly unreliable wireless communication and the critical network congestion, is beyond the capabilities of current vehicular networking concepts. In this article, we summarize the concepts of networked control systems and revisit the capabilities of current vehicular networking approaches. We then present opportunities of Tactile Internet concepts that integrate interdisciplinary approaches from both control theory, mechanical engineering, and communication protocol design. This way, it becomes possible to solve the high reliability and latency issues in this context.