Particle filtering with weight reshaping for opportunistic angle of arrival estimation in a vehicular scenario

The completion of the IEEE 802.11p standard paves the way for the long awaited deployment of vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication networks. They will enable the establishment of ad hoc car networks for the diffusion of sensor information and the implementation of a plethora of new services most of which requiring position information. In this respect, GPS based positioning plays an important role. In this paper, it is considered a different type of localization method that is based on the usage of roadside localization nodes. The basic idea is to use the IEEE 802.11p infrastructure in a "passive" way trying to enable a positioning service opportunistically listening to V2V and V2I communications. The usage of Road Side Units (RSUs) that detect position information from vehicles is interesting for instance to enable traffic monitoring services for consumer applications like driver assistance or in the emerging technology of self-driving cars. Positioning is performed using an ad hoc multiple antenna receiver that estimates the angle of arrival of the signal impinging the array. To offer good performance particle filtering is deployed for the estimation of the angle-of-arrival and track the position of the vehicles as they move with a broad range of velocities.