From collaborative awareness to collaborative information enhancement in vehicular networks

An increasing number of innovative technologies are fostering Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), thus setting the milestones of future paradigms in vehicular mobility. Among these technologies, Positioning Navigation and Timing (PNT) systems and low-latency communication networks play a fundamental role. This synergy can enable cooperative approaches leading to innovative, advanced services. Research contributions proposing these approaches rely on hypothetical protocols not being yet in place. An extension of current protocols is advisable to push forward the state-of-the-art solutions in PNT collaborative applications. To this aim, this work proposes a new type of vehicular message, namely Cooperative Enhancement Message (CEM), along with a related open protocol to permit the use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) raw measurements in vehicular networks. CEM aims at enabling information sharing beyond what is currently allowed by Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Collective Perception Messages (CPM). It complements such paradigms supporting the enhancement of localization accuracy, precision, and integrity guaranteed by state-of-the-art cooperative algorithms. Furthermore, a validation of the proposed study is accomplished through a novel network simulation framework. Contextually, the paper presents an analysis assessing network performance when concurrent CEM and CAM transmissions are intended to supply cooperative vehicle applications in IEEE 802.11p and Cellular-V2X.