Inter-Vehicle Range Estimation from Periodic Broadcasts

Abstract: Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) enables vehicular communication using periodic broadcast messages. We propose to use these periodic broadcasts to perform inter-vehicle ranging. Motivated by this scenario, we study the general problem of precise range estimation between pairs of moving vehicles using periodic broadcasts. Each vehicle has its own independent and unsynchronized clock, which can exhibit significant drift between consecutive periodic broadcast transmissions. As a consequence, both the clock offsets and drifts need to be taken into account in addition to the vehicle motion to accurately estimate the vehicle ranges. We develop a range estimation algorithm using local polynomial smoothing of the vehicle motion. The proposed algorithm can be applied to networks with arbitrary number of vehicles and requires no additional message exchanges apart from the periodic broadcasts. We validate our algorithm on experimental data and show that the performance of the proposed approach is close to that obtained using unicast round-trip time ranging. In particular, we are able to achieve sub-meter ranging accuracies in vehicular scenarios. Our scheme requires additional timestamp information to be transmitted as part of the broadcast messages, and we develop a novel timestamp compression algorithm to minimize the resulting overhead.