A Cooperative Position Fix Scheme Based on a Group Management on the Vehicular Network

Abstract

This paper proposes and evaluates the performance of a cooperative position fix scheme built on top of a group management mechanism carried out by processes distributed across the vehicular network. The main goal is to enhance the accuracy of map matching and thus the quality of diverse location-based services without extra equipment. Designed on the telematics network consisting of many vehicles simultaneously moving on the road network, the proposed scheme enables the in-vehicle telematics device to play a role of collecting GPS readings from its neighbors through an appropriate wireless network interface when necessary. With at least 3 affirmative points having just a single segment to match, the GPS deviation for each time instant can be estimated by solving an equation system which has more variables than equations, and the estimated term improves the accuracy of positioning data. The performance measurement result shows that the proposed scheme can reduce the ratio of ambiguous points from 32.0% to 20.6%, while increasing that of affirmative points from 61.0% to 71.2%, sharpening the gap between the best two matches.