Active RFID positioning of vehicles in road traffic

Vehicle positioning is critical for Inter-vehicle Communication, navigation, vehicle monitoring and tracking, which are regarded as the technology to make everyday-driving safer. Conventional positioning methods (for example GPS) have poor accuracy (approximately ten meters, D-GPS has higher accuracy about one or two meters.), and could not positioning onto the lane, which is not enough to satisfy vehicle safety requirements such as collision avoidance. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is an old but newly emerged technology. In this paper, we propose RFID technology into vehicle positioning to improve positioning performance. The idea of this positioning scheme is that the RFID tags are installed along lanes on road to form RFID matrix and the vehicle equipped with RFID readers locate itself by retrieving position information from tags around it, thus called Active RFID Positioning (ARP). The proposed ARP scheme not only dramatically improves the accuracy of positioning; it is also more practical as well for scenarios like tunnels or underground parking where GPS is not available now.