MARVEL

Abstract

Access to relative location of nearby vehicles on the local roads or on the freeways is useful for providing critical alerts to the drivers, thereby enhancing their driving experience as well as reducing the chances of accidents. The problem of determining the relative location of two vehicles can be broken into two smaller subproblems: (i) Relative lane localization, where a vehicle determines if the other vehicle is in left lane, same lane or right lane with respect to it, and (ii) Relative front-rear localization where it needs to be determined which of the two vehicles is ahead of the other on the road. In this paper, we propose a novel antenna diversity based solution, MARVEL, that solves the two problems of determining the relative location of two vehicles. MARVEL has two components: (i) a smartphone; and (ii) four wireless radios. Unlike exisiting technologies, MARVEL can also determine relative location of vehicles that are not in the immediate neighborhood, thereby providing the driver with more time to react. Further, due to minimal hardware requirements, the deployment cost of MARVEL is low and it can be easily installed on newer as well as existing vehicles. Using results from our real driving tests, we show that MARVEL is able to determine the relative lane location of two vehicles with 96.8% accuracy. Through trace-driven simulations, we also show that by aggregating information across different vehicles, MARVEL is able to increase the localization accuracy to 98%.