@article{Sun2026, 
author = {Baofeng Sun and Wenyu Yang and Guodong Ma and Xiaoxiang Na},
title = {Are Smartphones Viable for the V2X Transition? A Platoon-Perspective Stability Analysis under Real-World Errors},
year = {2026},
journal = {Journal of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles},
keywords = {connected human-driven vehicle (CHV), perceptual uncertainty, car-following model, mean-square stability},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/JICV.2026.9210106},
doi = {10.26599/JICV.2026.9210106},
abstract = {The benefits of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems remain limited by the large stock of conventional vehicles, low penetration, and high retrofit cost. From a platoon perspective, this paper evaluates smartphones as low-cost transitional V2X terminals. Because data accuracy is the main barrier to large-scale smartphone use, we collected 12 h of onboard reference data and 72 h of smartphone observations across three road scenarios, three smartphone vendors, and two device generations. We then analyzed the statistical characteristics of smartphone GNSS speed errors. The errors were well described by a three-component Laplace mixture model. Their main body consisted of two small-magnitude components and was accompanied by low-probability heavy-tailed errors. Based on the measured error characteristics, we developed a linear stochastic platoon dynamics model for connected human-driven vehicles (CHVs) and derived mean-square stability conditions to evaluate the stability applicability boundary of low-cost V2X. The results show that the current measured error parameters retain a good stability margin over the common driving speed range, and the occurrence probability and scale of the heavy-tailed component are the main factors affecting the strict mean-square stability boundary. Monte Carlo simulations further show that, under empirical full mixture errors, the average improvement in stability performance relative to the human-driven vehicle baseline reaches 75.84%, whereas the degradation relative to the ideal CHV case is only 1.79%. These results indicate that smartphones used as V2X terminals have the potential to improve platoon stability through vehicle state sharing. They provide a quantitative basis for transitional V2X deployment among existing vehicles.}
}