A novel local integrity concept for GNSS receivers in urban vehicular contexts

This paper proposes a novel concept of “local integrity” suitable to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers in urban vehicular scenarios. The idea is to take into account not only the system, but also the environment nearby the receiver in its nominal conditions, exploiting the potentialities offered by a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) infrastructure. In detail, the potential availability of multiple observations of GNSS signals, taken by different vehicles participating to a VANET, can be shared and combined in order to implement a collaborative spatial/temporal characterization and prediction of the local degradations of the GNSS signals. These concepts are intended to pave the way for the reconsideration/redefinition of the classic GNSS integrity concept, in order to overcome the major problems and limitations to its applicability in urban vehicular scenarios. The analytical development of the proposed methodology and the suitable network architecture for its implementation, as well as some validation results, are presented and discussed in the paper.