Positioning accuracy improvement via distributed location estimate in cooperative vehicular networks

The development of cooperative vehicle safety (CVS) applications, such as collision warnings, turning assistants, and speed advisories, etc., has received great attention in the past few years. Accurate vehicular localization is essential to enable these applications. In this study, motivated by the proliferation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, and the increasing sophistication of wireless communication technologies in vehicular networks, we propose a distributed location estimate algorithm to improve the positioning accuracy via cooperative inter-vehicle distance measurement. In particular, we compute the inter-vehicle distance based on raw GPS pseudorange measurements, instead of depending on traditional radio-based ranging techniques, which usually either suffer from high hardware cost or have inadequate positioning accuracy. In addition, we improve the estimation of the vehicles´ locations only based on the inaccurate GPS fixes, without using any anchors with known exact locations. The algorithm is decentralized, which enhances its practicability in highly dynamic vehicular networks. We have developed a simulation model to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, and the results demonstrate that the algorithm can significantly improve the positioning accuracy.