Characterizing Cooperative Positioning in VANET

Cooperative positioning (CP), a localization means that has been widely used in wireless sensor networks, is emerging as one of the promising solutions for improving the vehicular positioning in VANET. CP allows each individual node in the network to calibrate its own position, by leveraging distance measurements between neighbor nodes with unknown or estimated (e.g., from GPS) positions. While concepts of applying CP in VANET have been introduced, the actual performance of CP in real-world vehicular communication scenarios is largely unknown. In this paper, we bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive simulation study to characterize the performance of CP in realistic VANET environments. We investigate the efficacy of CP under the effects of various communication factors exhibiting in VANET. Further, we analyze the performance of CP with respect to the constraints from underlying non-cooperative vehicular localization techniques.