Improving Cooperative Positioning for Vehicular Networks

Cooperative positioning (CP) can potentially improve the accuracy of vehicle location information, which is vital for several road safety applications. Although concepts of CP have been introduced, the efficiency of CP under real-world vehicular communication constraints is largely unknown. Our simulations reveal that the frequent exchange of large amounts of range information required by existing CP schemes not only increases the packet collision rate of the vehicular network but reduces the effectiveness of the CP as well. To address this issue, we propose simple easily deployable protocol improvements in terms of utilizing as much range information as possible, reducing range broadcasts by piggybacking, compressing the range information, tuning the broadcast frequency, and combining multiple packets using network coding. Our results demonstrate that, even under dense traffic conditions, these protocol improvements achieve a twofold reduction in packet loss rates and increase the positioning accuracy of CP by 40%.