Compact Vehicular Trajectory Encoding

Many applications in vehicular communications require the collection of vehicular position traces. So far this has been done by recording and transmitting unencoded or merely linearly filtered position samples. Depending on the sample frequency and resolution, the resulting data load may be very large, consuming significant storage and transmission resources. In this paper, we propose a method based on two-dimensional cubic spline interpolation that is able to reduce the amount of the measurement data significantly. Our approach allows for a configurable accuracy threshold and performs in O(n³). We evaluate our approach with real vehicular GPS movement traces and show that it is able to reduce the volume of the measurement set by up to 80% for an accuracy threshold of 20 centimeters.