An Efficient Local Map Building Scheme based on Data Fusion via V2V Communications

The precise identification of vehicle positions, known as the vehicle localization problem, is an important requirement for building intelligent vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs). To solve this problem, two categories of solutions are proposed: stand-alone and data fusion approaches. Compared to stand-alone approaches, which use single information including the global positioning system (GPS) and sensor-based navigation systems with differential corrections, data fusion approaches analyze the position information of several vehicles from GPS and sensor-based navigation systems, etc. Therefore, data fusion approaches show high accuracy. With the position information on a set of vehicles in the preprocessing stage, data fusion approaches is used to estimate the precise vehicular location in the local map building stage. This paper proposes an efficient local map building scheme, which increases the accuracy of the estimated vehicle positions via V2V communications. Even under the low ratio of vehicles with communication modules on the road, the proposed local map building scheme showed high accuracy when estimating the vehicle positions. From the experimental results based on the parameters of the practical vehicular environments, the accuracy of the proposed localization system approached the single lane-level.