Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A New Challenge for Localization-Based Systems

A new kind of ad hoc network is hitting the streets: Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANets). In these networks, vehicles communicate with each other and possibly with a roadside infrastructure to provide a long list of applications varying from transit safety to driver assistance and Internet access. In these networks, knowledge of the real-time position of nodes is an assumption made by most protocols, algorithms, and applications. This is a very reasonable assumption, since GPS receivers can be installed easily in vehicles, a number of which already comes with this technology. But as VANets advance into critical areas and become more dependent on localization systems, GPS is starting to show some undesired problems such as not always being available or not being robust enough for some applications. For this reason, a number of other localization techniques such as Dead Reckoning, Cellular Localization, and Image/Video Localization has been used in VANets to overcome GPS limitations. A common procedure in all these cases is to use Data Fusion techniques to compute the accurate position of vehicles, creating a new paradigm for localization in which several known localization techniques are combined into a single solution that is more robust and precise than the individual approaches. In this paper, we further discuss this subject by studying and analyzing the localization requirements of the main VANet applications. We then survey each of the localization techniques that can be used to localize vehicles and, finally, examine how these localization techniques can be combined using Data Fusion techniques to provide the robust localization system required by most critical safety applications in VANets.