A Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Based Localization for a City Bus

Abstract: City busses are operated on roads where the GPS signal is weak, because of the tall buildings surrounding these roads. The localization of city busses, needs to therefore rely on alternate technique in order to improve the accuracy. Recent standardization of inter vehicular communication has made this a readily available tool which can be used for localization. This thesis presents an approach towards localization of a city bus by means of vehicular ad hoc network. The two main components of localization by this approach is the initialization of location estimate component, and the real time location estimation component. In particular, the thesis develops the use of minimum mean square estimation for initialization and an extended Kalman filtering approach for real time location estimation. The localization method is mathematically described, considering the operating scenarios of a city bus. The accuracy of the proposed method is mathematically evaluated. The developed localization method is implemented in a simulation tool kit for inter vehicular communication. Simulation experiments were performed for operating scenarios of city bus. The result of initialization by minimum mean square error is compared to that of initialization by GPS, in-terms of localization accuracy. Different setups of road side units are compared in-terms of accuracy and update interval. The results show that the proposed method is feasible for localization of a city bus. This thesis was carried out in association with Scania AB, Södertälje.