Multiscale Vehicle Localization in Heterogeneous Mobile Communication Networks

Low-latency and high-precision vehicle localization plays a significant role in enhancing traffic safety and improving traffic management for intelligent transportation. However, in complex road environments, the low latency and high precision requirements could not always be fulfilled due to the high complexity of localization computation. To tackle this issue, we propose a road-aware localization mechanism in heterogeneous networks (HetNet) of the mobile communication system, which enables real-time acquisition of vehicular position information, including the vehicular current road, segment within the road, and coordinates. By employing this multiscale localization approach, the computational complexity can be greatly reduced while ensuring accurate positioning. Specifically, to reduce positioning search complexity and ensure positioning precision, roads are partitioned into low-dimensional segments with unequal lengths by the proposed singular point (SP) segmentation method. To reduce feature-matching complexity, distinctive salient features (SFs) are extracted sparsely representing roads and segments, which can eliminate redundant features while maximizing the feature information gain. The Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of vehicle positioning errors is derived to verify the positioning accuracy improvement brought from the segment partition and SF extraction. Additionally, through SF matching by integrating the inclusion and adjacency position relationships, a multiscale vehicle localization (MSVL) algorithm is proposed to identify vehicular road signal patterns and determine the real-time segment and coordinates. Simulation results show that the proposed multiscale localization mechanism can achieve lower latency and high precision compared to the benchmark schemes.