Weighted localization in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks using vehicle-to-vehicle communication

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have attracted the interest of many researchers all over the world. With advances in technologies in wireless networks, vehicles will be able to communicate with each other and roadside units (RSU), to exchange road and traffic information. VANET and many other applications demand a real-time, accurate position of a vehicle; highlighting the importance of accurate localization. A number of methods and protocols have been proposed to fulfill this requirement, However, they have not attained high location accuracy required for VANET safety applications. We propose two new localization methods that assist vehicles in estimating their positions: 1) weighted localization (WL) using signal to interference-noise ratio (SINR) obtained from the exchange messages, and 2) weighted localization using SINR and distance between the neighboring vehicles (WLD). Our methods expand the concept of centroid localization (CL) by assigning a weight to each of the neighboring vehicles' coordinates, based on SINR values and the distance. We develop a simulation program to evaluate our methods against CL and relative span weighted localization (RWL). Our simulation results show that WLD demonstrates a better performance with less average location errors than CL and RWL in varying of densities.