Intervehicle-Communication-Assisted Localization

Vehicle localization is a key issue that has recently attracted attention in a wide range of applications. Navigation, vehicle tracking, emergency calling, and location-based services are examples of emerging applications with a great demand for location information. The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been the de facto standard solution for the vehicle-localization problem. Nevertheless, GPS-based localization is inaccurate and unreliable due to GPS' inherent poor performance in vertical positioning and the prevalent horizontal movement, in addition to anomalies caused by line-of-sight occlusions and multipath issues in urban canyons. Although augmenting GPS localization with inertial sensory data has demonstrated significant performance improvements, there remain situations that give rise to degraded localization accuracy-a deficiency that many applications cannot tolerate. In this paper, we propose intervehicle-communication-assisted localization, a localization technique that takes advantage of the emerging vehicle ad hoc networks environments. Communication among vehicles is utilized to compute a relative vehicle location, the integration of which with motion information and GPS location estimates leading to highly accurate vehicle localization. This proposed localization technique is tested in various simulated road-segment scenarios. It is evident from the simulation results that intervehicle communication has the potential to lead to the improvement of the robustness and accuracy of vehicle-location estimation.