Collaborative Positioning in low latency vehicular networks: Cooperative Integrity Monitoring

This research investigates the potentiality of Cooperative Vehicular Positioning in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) to mitigate the impacts of road transportation including road injuries, energy waste, and environmental pollution. At present, vehicular system is mainly based on the use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), that provides an absolute positioning with a good performance in open outdoor environments but, with a significant degradation or unavailability in urban canyons. However, thinking about a further improvement of absolute positioning capabilities is something unrealistic. Several works have pointed to Cooperative Positioning (CP) in vehicular networks, as the enabling technology to improve the quality of the estimated vehicles position in terms of space/time availability and reliability. Indeed, accurate and reliable positioning of vehicles is a decisive factor for many Intelligent Transportation System applications. To guarantee the reliability, GNSS integrity problem for vehicular positioning has a great value. Regular exchange of information between road users keeps them informed about each other’s position, driving kinematics, and other attributes. The technological revolution in the automotive industry will see every vehicle connected through Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X) technologies in the coming years. These technologies will overturn the mobility experience in all its forms. Extremely dynamic topologies, variable densities, high bandwidth demand with ultra-low latency expected, and relatively high-power availability, make vehicular networks something complex. This is the reason why various automotive applications are usually tested by simulations. In this work, a framework for simulating the network, coupled with SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility), will be utilized. Nowadays, one of the greatest challenges is to integrate real navigation data in a network of connected vehicles. Indeed, as future work, an important feature that could be added to the framework is the possibility of injecting real GPS traces in alternative to SUMO mobility trace generator. In that case, each node simulated in the network will send messages filled with positioning information coming from real devices. This thesis will investigate the performance of a GNSS solution, developing an application able to monitor integrity capability. Thus, it has been presented a new algorithm to evaluate the integrity of real position data available from GNSS receivers. Furthermore, to enable this Integrity Monitoring application, an analysis has been made on how to disseminate information coming from satellites in a network of connected vehicles.