A Grid-Based On-Road Localization System in VANET with Linear Error Propagation

GPS navigators have been widely adopted by drivers. However, due to the sensibility of GPS signals to terrain, vehicles cannot get their locations when they are inside a tunnel or on a road surrounded by high-rises where satellite signal is blocked. This incurs safety and convenience problems. To address the issue, we propose a novel Grid-based On-road localizaTion system (GOT), where vehicles with and without accurate GPS signals self-organize into a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), exchange location and distance information and help each other to calculate an accurate position for all the vehicles inside the network. The location information can be exchanged among vehicles one or multiple hops away in this paper. We explore fuzzy geometric relationship among vehicles, and apply a novel grid-based mechanism to evaluate the geometric relationships and calculate vehicle locations. Simulation shows our GOT system is effective and efficient in calculating vehicular positions.