RFID assisted vehicle positioning in VANETs

With technological advancement, recent VANET applications such as safe driving and emergency rescue often demand high position accuracy. Unfortunately, however, conventional localization systems, e.g., GPS, hardly meet new accuracy requirements. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes an RFID-assisted localization system. The proposed system employs the DGPS concept to improve GPS accuracy. A vehicle obtains two different position data: GPS coordinate from its own GPS receiver and accurate physical position via RFID communication. Then, it computes GPS error and shares it with neighbors to help them correct inaccurate GPS coordinates. To evaluate the proposed system, we conduct extensive experiments both on a simulator and on a real world test-bed. The simulation shows that, with the RFID-assisted localization system, vehicles can acquire accurate position both on a freeway and in an urban area. The results from the test-bed experiments demonstrate that the proposed system is feasible in the real VANET environment.

► We propose a vehicular localization system that exploits RFID technology.► RFID tags having their own geographical location are deployed over the road.► Each vehicle with an RFID reader uses both GPS signal and RFID-based location data.► RFID-assisted localization system is feasible and can improve position accuracy.