Toward increasing the localization accuracy of vehicles in VANET

In this paper, we propose a constrained weighting scheme of inter-vehicle communication assisted localization (CWS-IVCAL). CWS-IVCAL takes into consideration the location estimate uncertainty maintained by vehicles that use IVCAL as a localization technique. In IVCAL, communication among vehicles is utilized to compute inter-vehicle distances, which are integrated with motion information and GPS measurements in order to improve vehicle location estimates in multipath environments. The proposed scheme was tested and compared with a regular IVCAL scheme in a variety of simulated road segment scenarios. CWS-IVCAL has shown resilience not just against GPS unreliability in urban environments but also against erroneous inter-vehicle distance estimates. It is evident from the simulation that utilizing more location information has the potential to lead to improvement in the robustness and accuracy of vehicle location estimation.