Compact Vehicular Trajectory Encoding ( extended version )

Many applications in vehicular communications require the collection of vehicular position traces. So far this has been done by recording and transmitting unencoded position samples. Depending on the frequency and resolution of these samples, the resulting data may be very large, consuming significant resources for storage and transmission. In this paper, we propose a method based on two-dimensional cubic spline interpolation that is able to reduce the amount of the measurement data significantly. Our approach allows for a configurable accuracy threshold and performs its task in O(n). We evaluate our approach with real vehicular GPS movement traces and show that it is able to reduce the volume of the measurement set by up to 80 % for an accuracy threshold of 20 centimeters.