Decentralized position detection for moving vehicles

Modern cars are equipped with sensors that can detect other moving vehicles and obstacles on the road. However, their range is usually limited to line-of-sight and their accuracy is also limited. To provide information beyond the sensor range, each vehicle broadcasts Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) with its position and speed. For road awareness, it would be best if multiple vehicles could confirm the position (redundancy), using their on-board sensors for verification (diversity), and excluding position and speed errors (plausibility). This paper presents a decentralized solution that uses multiple vantage points to provide more trust in moving vehicle position data. It extends broadcast messages with sensor verification and plausibility filtering. It processes a stream of data from nearby vehicles and for short time periods, to achieve the safety benefits without the privacy risks of long-term data retention. The proposal was evaluated with detailed simulations with different levels of traffic and misbehavior. It provides good detection results with only a limited increase in network and computing resources.