inLaneCom: Enabling In-lane Vehicular Communication Using on-Board Smartphones

This paper introduces inLaneCom - a framework to facilitate message exchange between vehicles on the same lane. Given the GPS infeasibility for a lane-level accuracy, inLaneCom utilizes smartphone's inertial sensors to generate a unique lane signature used as lane ID in the exchanged messages. Lane signature consists of combined features extracted from phone's inertial sensors. Two main features types were exploited: physical features and traffic features. Physical features capture the characteristics of the lane surface such as bumps, potholes, and energy. Traffic features capture traffic characteristics such as speed, number of stops, waiting time per stop, acceleration, and deceleration. inLaneCom was evaluated under various road conditions, on highways and urban roads, using different types of vehicles. To the best of our knowledge, inLaneCom is the first framework to enable communication between vehicles on the same lane. This framework would enable several safety and navigation applications that require data exchange between vehicles on the same lane.