Relative driving direction detection for safety and non safety applications in vehicular communication networks

In vehicular communication networks vehicles keep exchanging geographical information. A vehicle should periodically inform other vehicles around about its geographical information. Each vehicle must be capable of geolocalization of itself, by using a geolocalization system such as GPS. When an event (e.g. traffic accident) happens on the road, some warnings are transmitted on the air to inform vehicles located around about this event. These warnings inform about the nature of the event and also about its exact location on the road. When receiving these warnings, a vehicle should be able to determine whether the event is geographically relevant to it or not. When having a digital map, the geographical relevance detection becomes relatively easy to manage. When a vehicle does not have access to a digital map, the geographical relevance could be determined just based on GPS information. In this paper we propose a new and efficient mechanism for geographical relevance detection based only on GPS information, which works even when no digital map information is available.