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Steady advances in autonomous vehicle development are expected to lead to improved traffic flow in terms of string stability compared with that for human-driven vehicles. Fluctuation in intervehicle distances among a group of vehicles without string stability is amplified as it propagates upstream (rearward), which may cause traffic congestion. Since it will take a few decades for autonomous vehicles to replace all human-driven vehicles, it is important to tackle the problem of traffic congestion in a mixed flow of human-driven and autonomous vehicles. Communication technologies such as fifth-generation mobile communication systems, which are improving rapidly, enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication with a sufficiently small delay. We previously reported a strategy based on vehicle-to-vehicle communication for avoiding traffic congestion by using leader–follower control, which is a distributed autonomous control strategy.