Performance Assessment of a Commercial GPS Receiver for Networking Applications

Recent years have seen an exponential increase of DVD equipped and navigation assisted cars. Nowadays a car trip can be both entertaining for passengers and computer assisted for drivers. In a further integration of automotive and information technologies, cars will be able to communicate to each other and to the Internet supporting safety, infotainment and pollution prevention applications. The research area which investigates topics, Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), is being widely investigated by both industry and academia. Position information plays a central role in many communication routing schemes designed for VANETs. This trend is justified by the feasibility of algorithms that route packets based on geographical proximity to the destination and by the widespread availability of navigation systems in cars. Geographical information is usually assumed accurate and precise. None of the algorithms available in literature, to the best of our knowledge, take into account possible position estimation errors. This paper is a first step in assessing the precision of a commercial GPS receiver for the support of vehicular communications. As we shall see, the performance of the receiver under investigation heavily depends on the type of urban area within this is employed. We believe that a strong understanding of the accuracy of such estimates is important to improve the performance and reliability of a vehicular network infrastructure.