  Vehicular Networked Systems (VNS) are mobile ad hoc networks where vehicles
exchange information over wireless communication networks to ensure safe and
efficient operation. It is, however, challenging to ensure system safety and
efficiency as the wireless channels in VNS are often subject to state-dependent
deep fades where the data rate suffers a severe drop and changes as a function
of vehicle states. Such couplings between vehicle states and channel states in
VNS thereby invalidate the use of separation principle to design event-based
control strategies. By adopting a state-dependent fading channel model that was
proposed to capture the interaction between vehicle and channel states, this
paper presents a novel self-triggered scheme under which the VNS ensures
efficient use of communication bandwidth while preserving stochastic stability.
The novelty of the proposed scheme lies in its use of the state-dependent
fading channel model in the event design that enables an adaptive and effective
adjustment on transmission frequency in response to dynamic variations on
channel and vehicle states. Under the proposed self-triggered scheme, this
paper presents a novel source coding scheme that tracks vehicle's states with
performance guarantee in the presence of state-dependent fading channels. The
efficacy and advantages of the proposed scheme over other event-based
strategies are verified through both simulation and experimental results of a
leader-follower example.
