Node-aided Locationing and Tracking for Low Cost Ad-hoc Automotive Sensor Networks

The main focus of this paper is to investigate how the co-operative nature of an ad-hoc sensor network can be exploited in order to reduce the complexity of accurate node locationing algorithms in sensor networks. We propose a new approach to target tracking called node-aided tracking that, unlike radar-like methods, exploits the two-way communication link of an ad-hoc sensor network. Further, we present a novel way of evaluating the performance of tracking filters used in automotive safety applications. This new measure, called the time margin difference, takes not only the mean-squared-error into account but also latency in providing location estimates and other important filter characteristics for a fair comparison between different tracking algorithms designed for automotive safety applications. At the end of the paper we present a brief comparison, based on simulation, between the node-aided tracking filter and a traditional high-order Kalman filter with respect to this new performance measure.