Finding Lane Positions of Vehicles: Infrastructure-Less Cooperative Lane Positioning Based on Vehicular Sensor Networks

In this article, we proposed an infrastructureless cooperative lane positioning (ICLP) framework using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The ICLP framework applies vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) to localize lane positions of vehicles on roads. ICLP allows the vehicles equipped with image sensors to detect the current located lane without utilizing global positioning system (GPS) locations and roadside infrastructures. Through image sensors, ICLP can keep recognizing the lane position for a vehicle. In addition, ICLP can request lane position information from other vehicles in the same lane as necessary, based on V2V communications. ICLP makes innovative applications of intelligent transportation systems relying on accurate positioning possible, such as lane-level cooperative collision avoidance, dynamic traffic control, and intelligent personal navigation. An Android-based prototype is implemented to verify the feasibility and superiority of our framework. The experimental results show that ICLP can achieve high positioning success ratios and provide accurate lane positions for vehicles.