Accurate positioning is a requirement for many applications, including safety-critical autonomous vehicles. To reduce cost and at the same time improving accuracy for positioning of autonomous vehicles, new methods, tools and research platforms are needed. We have created a low-cost testbed consisting of electronics and software, that can be fitted on model vehicles allowing them to follow trajectories autonomously with a position accuracy of around 3 cm outdoors. The position of the vehicles is derived from sensor fusion between Real-Time Kinematic Satellite Navigation (RTK-SN), odometry and inertial measurement, and performs well within a 10 km radius from a base station. Trajectories to be followed can be edited with a custom GUI, where also several model vehicles can be controlled and visualized in real time. All software and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) for our testbed are available as open source to make customization and development possible. Our testbed can be used for research within autonomous driving, for carrying test equipment, and other applications where low cost and accurate positioning and navigation is required. © 2018 Benjamin Vedder et al.

Cyclists are not well protected in accidents with other road users, and there are few active safety systems available for bicycles. In this study we have evaluated the use of inexpensive Real-Time Kinematic Satellite Navigation (RTK-SN) receivers with multiple satellite constellations together with dead reckoning for accurate positioning of bicycles to enable active safety functions such as collision warnings. This is a continuation of previous work were we concluded that RTK-SN alone is not sufficient in moderately dense urban areas as buildings and other obstructions degrade the performance of RTK-SN significantly. In this work we have added odometry to the positioning system as well as extending RTK-SN with multiple satellite constellations to deal with situations where the view of the sky is poor and thus fewer satellites are in view. To verify the performance of the positioning system we have used Ultra-Wideband radios as an independent positioning system to compare against while testing during poor conditions for RTK-SN. We were able to verify that adding dead reckoning and multiple satellite constellations improves the performance significantly under poor conditions and makes the positioning system more useful for active safety systems. © 2018 IEEE

Cooperative Awareness on the road is aiming to support the road users with knowledge about the surroundings relying on the information exchange enabled by vehicular com- munications. To achieve this goal European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) delivered the standard EN 302 637-2 for Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM). The CAM trig- gering conditions are based on the dynamics of the originating vehicle, which is checked periodically. In this paper, we show that standardized ETSI protocol may demonstrate a decrease in communication performance under several realistic mobility patterns. The potential influence of the discovered phenomena on two typical mobility scenarios is studied.

Many emerging applications based on wireless networks involve distributed control. This implies high requirements on reliability, but also on a predictable maximum delay and sometimes jitter. Further, many distributed control systems need to be constructed using off-the-shelf components, both due to cost constraints and due to interoperability with existing networks. This, in turn, implies that concurrent transmissions and multiuser detection are seldom possible. Instead, half-duplex time division multiple access (TDMA) is typically used. The total communication delay thereby depends on the packet error rate and the time until channel access is granted. With TDMA, channel access is upper-bounded and the jitter can be set to zero. With the aim to reduce the packet error rate given a certain deadline (a set of TDMA time-slots), we propose a novel relaying scheme, which can be implemented on top of off-the-shelf components. The paper includes a full analysis of the resulting error probability and latency. Numerical results show that the proposed relaying strategy significantly improves reliability given a certain maximum latency, or alternatively, reduces the latency, given a certain target reliability requirement. © 2016 IEEE.

Communication networks have become a fundamental part of many critical infrastructures, playing an important role in information delivery in various failure scenarios triggered e.g., by forces of nature (including earthquakes, tornados, fires, etc.), technology-related disasters (for instance due to power blackout), or malicious human activities. A number of recovery schemes have been defined in the context of network resilience (with the primary focus on communication possibility in failure scenarios including access to a particular host, or information exchange between a certain pair of end nodes). However, because end-users are becoming more and more interested in information itself (regardless of its physical location in the network), it is appropriate to complement the well-defined framework of network resilience with one that addresses information resilience, and to introduce definitions of relevant disciplines and measures, as proposed in this paper. © 2017 IEEE.

Using relayers in wireless networks enables higher throughput, increased reliability or reduced delay. However, when building networks using commercially available hardware, concurrent transmissions by multiple relayers are generally not possible. Instead one specific relayer needs to be assigned for each transmission instant. If the decision regarding which relayer to assign, i.e., which relayer that has the best opportunity to successfully deliver the packet, can be taken online, just before the transmission is to take place, much can be gained. This is particularly the case in mobile networks, as a frequently changing network topology considerably affects the choice of a suitable relayer. To this end, this paper addresses the problem of online relay assignment by developing a low-complexity algorithm highly likely to find the optimal combination of relaying nodes that minimizes the resulting error probability at the targeted receiver(s) using a mix of simulated annealing and ant colony algorithms, such that relay assignments can be made online also in large networks. The algorithm differs from existing works in that it considers both unicast as well as broadcast and assumes that all nodes can overhear each other, as opposed to separating source nodes, relay nodes and destination nodes into three disjoint sets, which is generally not the case in most wireless networks.

In LTE/LTE-A the Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism is the main approach for power saving in User Equipments (UEs) when in Connected and Idle mode. In this paper, an Idle mode DRX mechanism model is proposed also enabling evaluation of closely related mechanisms such as paging and Tracking Area Update (TAU). Two performance metrics are derived, namely the reachability delay and the power saving factor. © Copyright 2017 IEEE