Vehicle location estimation using air pressure measurements

The location information is widely exploited within vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to determine the coherence time of the vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) formed transiently incidental to the directions and velocities of vehicles, and used to provide location-based services and guidances to enable efficient wireless transmission from one vehicle to another, usually with the aid of employing rather complex algorithms with the global positioning system (GPS). It is however impossible for a V2V network to operate high-rate wireless transmissions among vehicles using sophisticated usage of radio frequencies if the GPS system is out of service. There accordingly exists a need for a new, simple and inexpensive technique to instantaneously estimate the vehicle locations when the GPS is not available. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to instantaneously estimate the vehicle locations only by using air pressure measurements collected while the vehicles move on the roads whose altitude profiles are previously obtained and stored in the database. Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out on random road networks in order to show how air pressure measurements are beneficially exploited in estimation of vehicle locations with small estimation errors.