Cooperative vehicle positioning with multi-sensor data fusion and vehicular communications Md. Anowar Hossain 1 • Ibrahim Elshafiey 1 • Abdulhameed Al-Sanie 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Vehicular positioning with multi-sensor fusion has achieved promising results in recent years. Having potential benefit from the emerging vehicular communications based on IEEE 802.11p dedicated short-range communication (DSRC), cooperative positioning opens new opportunities to support several vehicular applications. In addition, radar based active safety functions and GPS are being integrated into modern vehicles. With the availability of information from multiple sources, exchange of sensor information and multi-sensor fusion can be applied to obtain the precise positioning of vehicle without substantial additional cost. However, the main challenge in data fusion is the inherent data association problem due to dissimilar measurement update rate of DSRC and automotive radar. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a robust positioning approach considering track-to-track matching and fusion of position information obtained from multiple on-board sources such as GPS receiver, Vehicle-to-vehicle communication and automotive radar. Realistic 3D road traffic and wave propagation model is developed using a ray-tracing tool and the effectiveness of the proposed concept was evaluated. The system concept is validated by conducting extensive simulation considering realistic car following model. Results show that the proposed cooperative positioning method exhibits significant improvement in terms of positioning accuracy. Keywords Cooperative vehicle positioning  Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications  Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC)  Data fusion 1 Introduction Future advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) requires precise position information of road vehicles for applica- tions such as cooperative driving and automated platoon- ing. Global positioning system (GPS) provides coverage to most of the earth surface and exhibits low–cost devices, making it beneficial to be incorporated into vehicles. However, GPS is unstable in urban environments, because of ‘canyons’ or obstructed line-of-sight (LOS) formed by high-rise buildings besides the roads [1]. GPS-based vehicle positioning suffers from the lack of ubiquitous availability and susceptible to higher positioning errors (5 m to 30 m), which is not acceptable for vehicular safety applications and can only be used for navigation purposes. Currently, the relative position of surrounding vehicles is obtained using several short-range and long-range automotive radars equipped with modern vehicles [2, 3]. However, radar based relative positioning suffer from limited field-of-view (FOV) within line-of-sight (LOS) and can only be used for safety application such as collision avoidance. Moreover, positioning error of individual sen- sors (i.e. automotive radar, GPS) prevents making deci- sions for actions that require highly accurate position information. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) based on vehicular communication is going to play an important role in reducing traffic congestion, road accidents and envi- ronmental hazards. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle- & Md. Anowar Hossain ahossain@ksu.edu.sa Ibrahim Elshafiey ishafiey@ksu.edu.sa Abdulhameed Al-Sanie sanie@ksu.edu.sa 1 Electrical Engineering Department, King Saud University, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia 123 Wireless Networks https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-018-1772-6