Vehicular localization enhancement via consensus

This paper presents a strategy to cooperatively enhance the vehicular localization in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks by exchanges and updates of local data in a consensus-based manner. Where each vehicle in the network can obtain its location estimate despite its possible inaccuracy, the proposed strategy takes advantage of the abundance of the local estimates to improve the overall accuracy. During the execution of the strategy, vehicles exchange each other’s inter-vehicular relationship pertaining to measured distances and angles in order to update their own estimates. The iteration of the update rules leads to averaging out the measurement errors within the network, resulting in all vehicles’ localization error to retain similar magnitudes and orientations with respect to the ground truth locations. Furthermore, the estimate error of the anchor—the vehicle with the most reliable localization performance—is temporarily aggravated through the iteration. Such circumstances are exploited to simultaneously counteract the estimate errors and effectively improve the localization performance. Simulated experiments are conducted in order to observe the nature and its effects of the operations. The outcomes of the experiments and analysis of the protocol suggest that the presented technique successfully enhances the localization performances, while making additional insights regarding performance according to environmental changes and different implementation techniques.