Ibrahim Rashdan

Cooperative positioning and radar sensor fusion for relative localization of vehicles

Future advanced driver assistance systems require an accurate and up-to-date picture of the surrounding environment for applications such as forward collision assistants or adaptive cruise control. Today, the relative position of other objects with respect to the ego-vehicle is obtained with on-board ranging sensors, such as radar. By adding communication capabilities to future vehicles, cooperative approaches can offer a complementary source of relative position information. This paper proposes a fusion framework in which cooperative positioning information is fused with on-board radar sensor data. The measurement runs recorded on a highway and a rural road, demonstrate that the fusion of both information sources outperforms the positioning estimation using solely the radar sensor. An assessment of the current standard for vehicular communication in real world driving environments shows that a cooperative approach is able to extend the perception range of radar sensors in non-Line-of-Sight situations.

Cooperative Infrastructure-Based Vehicle Positioning

Many Advanced Driver Assistance Systems rely on an accurate self-localization. This is usually provided by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) along with on-board sensors, such as inertial sensors, speed sensors, wheel-tick sensors and steering wheel angle sensors. However, this approach suffers from incremental error growth when long GNSS outages occur. Additionally, it is widely accepted that GNSS has a poor performance in urban-like environments due to satellite line-of-sight blockage, signal attenuation and multipath propagation. We propose a solution in which the error associated to GNSS-based positioning is contained by using surrounding road infrastructure objects (RIO) that are detected with a radar sensor. Since the position of these objects is a-priori not known, we suggest to share their estimated location among the vehicles using vehicle-to-vehicle communication and, in this way, improve their over-all position accuracy over time. In this way, vehicles entering a GNSS-denied area are able to maintain their position accuracy, achieving even better results as if GNSS was available in the area of interest.

Analysis of Communication Requirements for CACC in Stop-and-Go Behavior for Energy Efficient Driving

Electric Vehicles (EVs) nowadays suffer from range anxiety due to their short driving range and long battery recharging time. One solution to mitigate range anxiety problem is by reducing the unnecessary stop-and-go events to reduce energy consumption. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is one of the Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) applications that can provide safe and smooth driving. In VANETs, all vehicles share their state information periodically by transmitting Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) to their neighbors using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. CACC exploits the state information of the neighboring vehicles to operate adaptive and energy efficient maneuver. To satisfy the CACC requirements, vehicles need to provide sufficient and accurate information. The precision of this information is highly dependent on the update rate of CAMs and on their communication range. High update rate and communication range can cause channel congestion and increase packet collisions. The focus in this paper is to determine the required update rate and communication range that satisfy the requirements of the CACC to reduce the energy consumption for EVs. Simulation results also show the benefit of using CACC on the energy consumption.

Performance Evaluation of Traffic Information Dissemination Protocols for Dynamic Route Planning Application in VANETs

Dynamic route planning is one of the ITS efficiency applications that reduce travel time and energy consumption. To perform efficient route planning, real-time traffic information should be collected and disseminated to vehicles on other road segments. vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are a promising technology that can provide the communication means to deliver the required traffic information. In this paper, we study and evaluate three state-of-the-art dissemination protocols in realistic vehicular scenarios. The evaluated protocols are geocast-based beacon piggybacking protocol, a low-overhead adaptation of it and greedy perimeter stateless routing (GPSR). As performance metrics we measure the average end-to-end delay, average routing overhead and the packet delivery ratio as a function of traffic density. The goal is to find a reliable dissemination protocol that fulfills the application requirements and requires low routing overhead. Simulation results show that all three protocols achieve the requirements of dynamic route planning in end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio. However, a significant reduction in the routing overhead can be achieved by the modified piggybacking protocol.

Communication protocol for platoon of electric vehicles in mixed traffic scenarios

Vehicle platooning, where vehicles drive in a convoy with small relative distance, is a promising technology for road transportation. In particular, for Electric Vehicles (EVs), platoon of EVs (e-platoon) can help EVs not only reduce energy consumption but also allow them to exchange energy and charge their battery from a moving electric source on the fly. E-platooning requires Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication with very frequent information exchange and very high reliability between vehicles. This poses a big challenge on the communication system especially when e-platooning coexists with other safety-related applications in a mixed traffic scenario. In this work, we consider communication protocols based on ITS-G5 in the Control Channel (CCH) for e-platoon. We propose to use an additional with antennas for communication between e-platoon members and a deterministic distributed scheduling scheme together with dynamic switching of antenna beams. Simulations show that the our protocol can improve the performance of the communication between e-platoon members by reducing the Update Delay (UD) significantly.