Network Design for Accurate Vehicle Localization

Network-based localization plays a key role on the introduction of emerging road applications, such as connected autonomous driving. These applications demand unprecedented precise, reliable and secure positioning, with localization requirements below 1 m. This stringent demand is pushing for the use of road-side units (RSUs) from fifth generation and vehicular networks for accurate vehicle localization. However, these networks are not typically designed for positioning but for data communication purposes, which follow a different paradigm for the network deployment and operation. This paper provides design guidelines on dedicated network deployments with the aim of achieving accurate vehicle-to-infrastructure positioning in road scenarios. First, the network layout or site placement is assessed with a geometrical metric. Then, the minimum density of RSUs along the road is bounded with line-of-sight probability models for urban street and highway scenarios. Finally, the Cramér–Rao bound for joint time-of-arrival (ToA) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) localization is used to maximize the distance between RSUs along the road, by exploiting multi-antenna deployments. According to the simulation results, the network sites are recommended to be located at alternate sides of the road, with a maximum distance between RSUs of 40 and 230 m for urban and rural environments, respectively. Following these design guidelines, there is also the need to exploit antenna arrays to combine uplink ToA and AoA estimates, in order to ensure a vehicle location accuracy below one meter on the 95% of the cases. The use of eight antenna elements at the RSUs is found to reduce nearly one and a half times the minimum network density in highway localization deployments.