Wireless Pers Commun

DOI 10.1007/s11277-014-2025-3

Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs

Using A Kalman Filter

Huifang Feng · Chunfeng Liu · Yantai Shu ·

Oliver W. W. Yang

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Location information is very important for many applications of vehicular net-
works such as routing, network management, data dissemination protocols, road congestion,
etc. If some reliable prediction is done on vehicle’s next move, then resources can be allocated
optimally as the vehicle moves around. This would increase the performance of VANETs.
A Kalman filter is employed for predicting the vehicle’s future location in this paper. We
conducted experiments using both real vehicle mobility traces and model-driven traces. We
quantitatively compare the prediction performance of a Kalman filter and neural network-
based methods. In all traces, the proposed model exhibits superior prediction accuracy than
the other prediction schemes.

Keywords Vehicular ad-hoc network · Location prediction · Kalman filter

1 Introduction

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) are considered to be a special application of

infrastructure-less wireless Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs). It provides communi-
cations among moving vehicles and roadside equipments that are in close proximity to each
other. Using vehicle-to-vehicle communication, urgent messages can be transmitted among
vehicles to support intelligent transport systems. Conversely, using vehicle-to-infrastructure

H. Feng (B)
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northwest Normal University,
Lanzhou 730070, China
e-mail: fenghuifang2003@163.com; hffeng@nwnu.edu.cn

C. Liu · Y. Shu
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China

O. W. W. Yang
School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE),
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada

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Table 1 Required localization

Technique Localization accuracy
accuracy for some VANETs
applications Low Medium High
√
Routing
√
Data dissemination
√
Map localization
√
Cooperative adaptive cruise control
√
Cooperative intersection safety
√
Blind crossing
√
Platooning
√
Vehicle collision warning systems
√
Vision enhancement
√
Automatic parking

communication, vehicles can access Internet through the access points to communicate with
their correspondent nodes. Therefore, VANETs has become an active area of research, stan-
dardization, and development because it can be utilized for a broad range of safety and
non-safety applications, for value-added services such as vehicle safety, automated toll pay-
ment, traffic management, enhanced navigation, for location-based services such as finding
the closest fuel station, restaurant or travel lodge, and for infotainment applications such as
providing access to the Internet [1]. In these networks, knowledge of the real-time position
of nodes is an assumption made by most protocols, algorithms, and applications.
Even though some VANETs applications do not require any localization to function, they
can still take advantage of localization and show better performance when the position infor-
mation of vehicles is available. The different accurate localization information adapt for
different applications [2,3]. The applications which include routing protocols, data dissem-
ination protocols, road congestion, and map localization are able to work with inaccurate
localization. These applications will accept localization errors mostly within 10–20 or even
30 m, since the long transmission range of the vehicles’ transmitters can compensate for these
localization inaccuracies. However, the greater the localization error, the worse performance
is. Applications which include cooperative adaptive cruise control, cooperative intersection
safety, and vehicle following or platooning can accept localization errors mostly from 1 to 5
m. A third class of applications for VANETs requires very precise and reliable localization
systems. Most of these applications are critical safety applications such as vehicle collision
warning systems and other driver assistance applications. In these cases, localization errors
less than 1 m are acceptable. The localization requirements for VANETs applications are then
summarized in Table 1.
There have been works on location prediction. The learning automaton [4] follows a
linear reward-penalty reinforcement learning method for location prediction. However, such
model does not provide satisfactory prediction accuracy. Evidential reasoning [5] is used in
mobility prediction when knowledge on the mobility patterns is not available. However, this
model has a large computational complexity. Movement rules [6] were also tried based on
the node’s past movement patterns, but with a low prediction accuracy. The authors in [7]
introduce a prediction model that uses grey theory. An auto-regression-based mobility model
[8] can allow each node and its neighbor to collaborate to update the model in order to more
accurately predict its own future position. Markov mobility models [9–11] are capable of

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

utilizing the movement history in cellular mobile networks, in which user movements are
“mined” from global positioning system (GPS) traces. The GPS traces are also tested by a
state-full prediction model using the adaptive resonance theory [12]. It is an online learning
and adaptive algorithm capable of detecting changes and then adapting/updating only parts of
the model, thus providing fast adaptation of the underlying model. The drawback of this model
is that it has significant storage requirements in order to store the user patterns. In addition, the
model in [12] responds slowly to changes, thus, cannot achieve fast adaptation to previously
unseen mobility behavior. They then propose a short-memory adaptive location predictor
that realizes mobility prediction in the absence of extensive historical mobility information.
Their predictor is based on a local linear regression model, while its adaptation capability is
achieved through a fuzzy controller [13].
The aforementioned prediction models have been used for the MANET and cellular mobile
networks. Though VANETs is a type of MANET, there is significant difference between
the two. Since vehicles are fast-moving, the network topology changes more rapidly in
VANETs. This rapid change makes it maybe difficult to determine the exact location of
the vehicle. However, the mobility pattern of VANETs nodes is such that they move on
specific paths (roads) and hence not in random direction. This gives VANETs some advantage
over MANETs as the mobility pattern of VANETs nodes is predictable. On the other hand,
Vehicles can be equipped with accurate positioning systems integrated by electronic maps. For
example, GPS receivers are very popular in cars which help to provide location information
for routing, localization and security issues. Moreover, a major aspect of VANETs is that
unlike nodes in MANETs, the VANETs nodes are vehicles which have enough battery power
and can have high computing power. This means that unlike a majority of MANETs, vehicles
have sufficient power; computing and storage capacity allows the nodes to run GPS system.
In this paper, we are interested in predicting the location of a vehicle accurately in VANETs.
To explore the capabilities in terms of reliable performances of Kalman filter in predicting
future location of a vehicle, we use real traffic traces generated from VANETs collected under
the different network environment. Moreover, a comparative study on a one-step ahead pre-
diction using Kalman filter and artificial neural networks (ANN) is addressed. Our main
contributions is to show that a Kalman filter is successfully applied to predict the moving
vehicle’s future location information with the aid of GPS in a VANETs. The proposed predic-
tion can be used in many applications such as routing protocols, data dissemination protocols,
road congestion, and map localization, etc.
This paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 describes the Kalman filter model. Section 3
describes the proposed mobility prediction. Section 4 illustrates the dataset, performance
metrics, and the effectiveness of the proposed mobility prediction. Finally, some concluding
remarks are presented in Sect. 5. For the remainder of this paper, the following symbols and
notations pertain.

At state transition matrix at time t;

Ht output matrix relating the node’s state to the measurement Z t ;
Kt Kalman gain;
M total number of the predicted values;
Pt|t−1 covariance matrix of the a priori error;
Pt|t covariance matrix of the a posteriori error;
Q covariance matrix of the model noise;
R covariance matrix of measurement noise;
t time variable;
T transpose operator;

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t the sampling interval;

ut measurement error vector;
wt system error vector;
Xt system states at time t;
X̂ t|t−1 priori estimate of the state X t ;
X̂ t|t posteriori estimate of the state X t ;
Zt measurement vector at time t.

2 Kalman Filter Model

2.1 Overview of Kalman Filter

A Kalman filter [14] is an efficient recursive filter that estimates the state of a linear dynamic
system from a series of noisy measurements. The filter is essentially a set of mathematical
equations and state space models that implements a predictor–corrector type estimator that
is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the estimated error covariance. It applies to non-
stationary as well as stationary processes. A Kalman filter has two important vectors: state
and measurement.
The state vector X t is the minimal set of data to describe the dynamic behavior of the
system. In other words, the state is the least amount of data about the past behavior of the
system that is needed to predict its future behavior. The measurement vector is a measurement
at time t. The Kalman filter uses two equations: the process equation and the measurement
equation. The process equation is used to predict the state of the system at for a given and is
defined as
X t+1 = At X t + wt , (1)
where At is a state transition matrix at time t. The process noise wt is Gaussian with zero
mean and a covariance matrix Q.
On the other hand, the measurement equation (also known as the observations equation)
is:
Z t = Ht X t + u t , (2)
where Z t is a measurement vector at time t. Ht is called the measurement matrix. The
measurement noise u t is assumed to be a Gaussian with zero mean and a covariance matrix
R.
The Kalman filter gives a method for the recursive estimation of the unknown state X t
based on measurement values Z t up to time t. In the Kalman filtering algorithm we use a
pair of time points priori- and posteriori-. At time t, we already have an estimate of state X t
predicted at time t − 1. Then X̂ t|t−1 is called the priori estimate of X t , and X̂ t|t is called the
posteriori estimate of X t . In a similar manner, Pt|t−1 is a priori error covariance matrix and
Pt|t is a posteriori error covariance matrix.
As soon as the new observation value (GPS measurement) Z t is known and the posteriori
estimate is written as given in Ref. [15].
X̂ t|t = X̂ t|t−1 + K t (Z t − H X̂ t|t−1 ), (3)
where the Kalman gain K t is derived as
K t = Pt|t−1 HtT (Ht Pt|t−1 HtT + R)−1 . (4)

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

Once the posterior estimate is determined, the posterior error covariance matrix can be
derived as follows
Pt|t = (I − K t Ht )Pt|t−1 . (5)
The one-step-ahead estimate is formulated as
X̂ t+1|t = At X̂ t|t , (6)
and the one-step-ahead error covariance matrix is derived as
Pt+1|t = At Pt|t AtT + Q. (7)
Based on Eqs. (3)–(7), recursive steps for constructing an one-step prediction is updated from
time to t + 1.

2.2 Choice of Filter Parameters

In order to use the Kalman filter to process the GPS location data, we have to know the
process noise covariance Q and the measurement noise covariance R. There are two typical
ways to construct Q and R for Kalman filter. (1) The classical method that chooses the values
for these two matrices is through empirical analysis on the system and measurement errors
or manually in an ad hoc fashion [16]: Q and R are covariance matrices and thus must be
symmetric and positive semidefinite. Measuring R is relatively easier than measuring Q. By
tuning the estimates of the error covariance matrices, superior performance of the filter can
be achieved. The determination of the process noise covariance is generally more difficult. A
very rough idea is to make Q so large that it just about matches the effects of the measurement
noise R. In the actual implementation of the filter, whether or not we have a rational basis for
choosing the parameters, often times superior filter performance can be obtained by tuning the
filter parameters Q and R. The tuning is usually performed off-line. (2) The other improved
methods are developed by many researchers. The very pioneer work from Mehra [17] used
the autocorrelation functions of the innovation sequence to estimate both Q and R. Another
alternate method was to introduce the adaptive algorithms based on the system innovation
sequence either to derive R and a scale factor for Q [18], or to indirectly estimate Q and
R [19]. The direct gradient-based optimisation methods and the expectation-maximisation
(EM) algorithm are developed for constructing the filter parameters Q and R [16].
In this paper, we choose the values for these two matrices is through empirical analysis
[20]. By tuning the estimates of the error covariance matrices, superior performance of the
filter can be achieved.

3 The Location Prediction Algorithm

The Kalman filter is used to predict the vehicle’s position as described in this section. The state
vector of a vehicle consists of its location and speed. Therefore, Let X t = (xt , vxt , yt , v yt )
be a 4 × 1 state vector, where xt and yt represent the x and y coordinates of the location of
the vehicle, respectively, vxt and v yt represent speed of a vehicle along the x-axis and y-axis,
respectively. Since the state vector is assumed not to change significantly within t, then vxt
and v yt represent average speed within t. Therefore, the new coordinate in the next time
step can be approximated by
xt = xt−t + vxt t,
(8)
yt = yt−t + v yt t,

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Then, we can obtain the 4 × 4 transitional matrix At as follows:

⎡ ⎤
1 t 0 0
⎢0 1 0 0 ⎥
At = ⎢⎣ 0 0 1 t ⎦ .
⎥ (9)
0 0 0 1
Here t is the sampling interval and corresponds to the time interval, for simplicity t = 1.
In the measurement update stage, we adjust estimation of the unknown state X t based on
measurement values Z t . In this application, the position of the vehicle is measured. Therefore,
Z t (t = 1, 2, . . .) is the 2 × 1 observation vector representing the data sequence of historical
position (xt , yt ). This requires the matrix Ht to be defined as

1 0 0 0
Ht = . (10)
0 0 1 0
The estimation problem begins with no prior measurements. Often, the initial state is fixed
at the unconditional expectation of X , thus, X̂ 0|−1 = 0. Most typically the diagonal of this
matrix P0|−1 are fixed at large values, while the off-diagonal elements are fixed at zero. The
initial values for P0|−1 matrices is determined as follows
⎡ ⎤
10000 0 0 0
⎢ 0 10000 0 0 ⎥
P0|−1 = ⎢⎣ 0
⎥. (11)
0 10000 0 ⎦
0 0 0 10000
The initial values for the other matrices are determined as follows
⎡ ⎤
0.001 0 0 0 
⎢ 0 0.001 0 0 ⎥ 1 0
Q=⎣ ⎢ ⎥ , R= . (12)
0 0 0.001 0 ⎦ 0 1
0 0 0 0.001
According to the aforementioned statements, we can now give our location prediction
algorithm as an extension of the KF algorithm [15]: (1) Initial conditions, i.e. X̂ 0|−1 , P̂0|−1 ,
Â0 , Ĥ0 , Q, R have to be known to start recursive steps. (2) Based on Eqs. (3)–(7), recursive
steps for constructing an one-step prediction is updated from time t to t + 1. The prediction
algorithm is summarized in Fig. 1.

4 Performance Evaluation

We implemented our prediction algorithm on a laptop computer in MATLAB. In order to

verify the prediction model, we perform experiments based on different sets of mobility
traces. The three real vehicle mobility traces and one model-driven trace are used to evaluate
the performance of our location prediction algorithm in VANETs.

4.1 Datasets

4.1.1 Real Vehicle Mobility Traces

The real movement traces of mobile users are obtained from the cities of Aalborg, Denmark,
Shanghai, China, and northwest sector of Atlanta, Georgia.

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

Fig. 1 Kalman filter based prediction algorithm

The first set of traffic traces consists of GPS data logs collected in the city of Aalborg in
Denmark [21]. There are two subsets: the INFATI log-data from Team-1 of 11 cars collected
during the period of December 2000 and January 2001, and the INFATI log-data from Team-2
of nine cars collected during the period of February and March 2001. The data contains car
identifier, time, location, velocity, etc. When a car was moving, its GPS position was sampled
every second. The GPS positions were stored in the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM
32) format. This trace provides fine-grained location information. The details are described
in Ref. [22].
The second set of traces was captured by the Shanghai Taxi GPS System. The data include
the traces of 4,000 taxis moving around in Shanghai within 24 h. Each trace consists of a
report periodically sent back to the data center via a GPS-enabled device onboard the taxi.
Each report gives the vehicle’s ID, coordinates (longitude and latitude) of the current location,
timestamp, moving speed, direction and operational status [23,24]. To reduce the cost of data
transmission, reports are sent at intervals of around 1 min. In order to obtain fine-grained (1 s)
location information, we use cubic splines to interpolate the data points, with the stipulation
that the two curves obtained from either side of the data point must be continuous and smooth.
We then use MATLAB to convert the longitude and latitude coordinates into plane rectangular
coordinates by Gauss-Krger projection [25].
The third set of traces was research group of Georgia Institute of Technology at northwest
sector of Atlanta, Georgia [26]. For the experiments, laptop computers running Red Hat Linux
9, an ORINOCO 802.11b gold card with a 2.5 dB omni-directional external antenna placed
on the roof of the vehicle, and a Garmin 72 GPS receiver. The wireless cards configured in
IBSS ad-hoc mode with power management turned off and a fixed data rate. The GPS reports
latitude, longitude, speed, and heading of the vehicle every 2 s. The location information
reported by GPS has an accuracy of 5–7 m. We obtained location information every second
through interpolation. The details are described in Ref. [27].

4.1.2 The Model-Driven Trace

The Freeway mobility model is used in VANETs research. The Freeway mobility model
proposed by Bai et al. [28,29] models the behavior of vehicles traveling on a freeway. Each
mobile node is restricted to its lane on the highway, and its velocity is temporally dependent
on its previous velocity. Relationship between the speeds at subsequent time slots:

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vi (t + 1) = vi (t) + random()∗ ai (t), (13)

where ai is the acceleration constant of node i.
Relationship between the speed of a vehicle (i) and the speed of the vehicle in front (j):
d(i, j) ≤ dsa f et y ⇒ vi (t) ≤ v j (t), (14)
where dsa f et y is the safety distance to the front vehicle.
We use a mobility simulator called MobiSim [30] to generate our traffic trace. MobiSim
is an open source Java-based simulator which can generate mobility traces based on various
mobility models.

4.2 Performance Measures

The KF is a set of mathematical equations that provides an adaptive modeling of state variables
for the minimization of the squared error. So we use the following metrics to measure the
performance of our prediction model:
1) M S E The mean squared error (M S E) measures the deviation of the predicted value x̂ t
at time t from its real observed value xt . Mathematically, it is given by
1 M
MSE =  (xt − x̂t )2 , (15)
M t=1
where M is the total number of the predicted values. The M S E indicates a perfect forecast
when zero and an increasing error with increasing M S E values.
2) N M S E The normalized mean squared error (N M S E) is M S E normalized with respect
to the variance σ 2 of the time series over the prediction duration. Mathematically, this is
given by
1 1 M
N MSE =  (xt − x̂t )2 . (16)
σ M t=1
The N M S E is widely used for measuring the prediction performance with respect to
some reference. It can be seen that for a perfect predictor, N M S E = 0, and for a trivial
predictor that statistically predicts the mean of the actual time series, N M S E = 1. So the
prediction performance is worse than that of trivial predictor when N M S E > 1, and the
opposite when N M S E < 1.
3) DistanceErr or In order to judge whether the predictor is successful in predicting the
future point, we introduce a prediction error of distance from the measured distance
between the actual mobile node position and its predicted position. Mathematically, it is
given by
Derr or = (x, y) − (x̂, ŷ). (17)
A closely related metric is the average discrepancy between the actual position and the
predicted position. It is given by
1 M
Daverageerr or =  (xt − x̂t )2 + (yt − ŷt )2 . (18)
M t=1
4) DistanceT hr eshold In order to determine the sensitivity of the VANETs application
on the predicted location of the mobile node given by the prediction algorithm, we also
define a threshold θ > 0 which is the radius of a circle centered on the actual location
(x, y). A prediction decision is considered successful if the predicted position (x̂, ŷ) of

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6
x 10
6.324 200
(a) (b)

distance error (m)

6.3235 150

100
6.323
50
6.3225
0
6.322 0 500 1000
y (m)

actual position
t (s)
predicted position
6.3215
25
(c)
6.321 20

speed (m/s)
6.3205 15
start
10
6.32
5
6.3195 0
5.55 5.555 5.56 5.565 5.57 5.575 0 500 1000
5
x (m) x 10 t (s)

Fig. 2 Prediction of the mobile node’s location for INFATI trace

the mobile node lie within θ , i.e. Derr or ≤ θ . Otherwise, the prediction fails. Obviously,
the value θ is application-specific.

4.3 Prediction Results and Analysis

4.3.1 Location Prediction by Kalman Filter

Figure 2a shows the prediction of node’s location over an interval of time for INFATI trace.
Figure 2b shows the distance error Derr or . Figure 2c shows the vehicle’s speed with respect
to time, which can vary from 1 to 20.6155 m/s. Sharp peaks and dramatic changes in the
vehicle’s speed denote a turn in the vehicle’s direction. By comparing Fig. 3a–c, we see that
significant errors occur when the vehicle makes a turn and changes speed.
Figure 3a–c shows the location prediction, prediction distance error, and vehicle’s speed
for the Shanghai traces. Observations similar to Fig. 3 can be made. When the node moves
in a straight line, one would notice that the predictor have a relatively small level of distance
error. That is, the prediction errors appear to be largely affected by turns or change rate of
vehicle’s speed. From Figs. 3b, c, the results show that when vehicle speed is low, distance
error is low.
Figure 4 shows the results with the proposed prediction for Georgia trace. Figure 4a–c
shows the location prediction, prediction distance error, and vehicle’s speed for the Georgia
trace. Observations similar to Figs. 2 and 3 can be made. The proposed prediction algorithm
in both cases gives a good performance when the node is moving in a straight line, but the
performance degenerates at a turn or dramatic changes in the vehicle’s speed.
We also use the model-driven trace to verify the prediction model performance at low
vehicle’s speed. The Freeway mobility model is used in most VANETs research. In the
mobility scenario, 10 mobile nodes moved in an area of 500 m × 500 m for a period of 1,000 s.
The minimum and maximum speeds are 5 and 10 m/s, respectively, and the safety distance is
2 m. The maximum acceleration is 2 m/s2 . All the nodes were distributed randomly in all the
two lanes. Figure 5 shows the forecasted location, distance error Derror, and vehicle’s speed
for mobile node. Figure 5a shows the movement pattern of the cars along a freeway. Since the

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4
x 10
6.9 250
(a) start (b)

distance error (m)

200
6.85
150

100
6.8
50

6.75 0
0 1000 2000 3000
y (m)

t (s)
6.7 40
(c)
30

speed (m/s)
6.65

actual position 20
6.6 predicted position
10

6.55 0
1.3528 1.353 1.3532 1.3534 1.3536 1.3538 0 1000 2000 3000
7
x (m) x 10 t (s)

Fig. 3 Prediction of the mobile node’s location for Shanghai trace

−8700 150
start (a) (b)
distance error (m)

−8750
100
−8800

−8850 50

−8900
0
−8950 0 200 400
y (m)

t (s)
−9000
25
−9050 (c)
20
speed (m/s)

−9100 actual position

15
predicted position
−9150 10
−9200 5

−9250 0
9.378 9.3785 9.379 9.3795 9.38 0 200 400
6
x (m) x 10 t (s)

Fig. 4 Prediction of the mobile node’s location for Georgia trace

node moves in a straight line most of the time, one would notice that the prediction location
of the node is almost a straight line. From Fig. 5b, c, we notice that the proposed prediction
algorithm in both cases gives a good performance when the node moving at low moving
speed, but the performance degenerates at a turn or dramatic changes rate of node’s speed.

4.3.2 Distance Error

As reviewed in Sect. 1, there are three different types of application depending on their
sensitivity to the location accuracy. Figure 6 compares the sensitivity among different distance

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

450 80
(a) (b)

distance error (m)

400 start 60

40
350

20
300
0
250 0 100 200
y (m)

t (s)
200
15
(c)
150

speed (m/s)
10
100

actual position 5
50
predicted position

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 50 100 150 200
x (m) t (s)

Fig. 5 Prediction of the mobile node’s location for Freeway trace

90
87.8% INFATI
80 Shanghai
Georgia
Freeway
70

60
percentage %

50

40 36.7%
34.5%
33.6% 32.6%
29.8% 31.8%
30
23.5%
20.8% 21.6%
20
12.2% 12.9%
10.1%
10 8.3%
2.2%
1.7%

0
θ<=10 10<θ<=30 30<θ<=50 50<θ
distance threshold
Fig. 6 The percentage of the distance error

threshold θ for each set of data traces. Take the INFATI data as an example, the distance error
distribution shows that 10.1 % of the values have the distance error less than 10 m. 23.5 %
values show a distance error between 10 and 30 m. 29.8 % values show a distance error
between 30 and 50 m. The rest of the 36.7 % values have the distance error more than 50 m.
For Shanghai trace, we can see that 33.6 % of the values have the distance error less than 10 m.
21.6 % values show a distance error between 10 and 30 m. 32.6 % values have the distance
error more than 50 m. The distance error distribution of Freeway shows that 87.8 % of the

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values have the distance error less than 10 m. Only 2.2 % of the values have the distance error
more than 50 m. The rest of the 10 % values show a distance error between 10 and 50 m. We
notice that the model-driven trace exhibit the better prediction performance than real vehicle
mobility traces. The most important reason is that the node mobility speed of model-driven
trace is lower than that of real vehicle mobility traces, i.e. the Kalman-based prediction give
the better performance when the nodes had low movement speeds.
According to Fig. 6, we also calculate the cumulative percentage of the different distance
error. We find that 33.5, 55.2, 55.3, and 96.1 % from four mobility traces (INFATI, Shanghai,
Georgia, Freeway) have a distance error less than 30 m. The distance error distribution of
four mobility traces also show that 63.3, 67.4, 68.2, and 97.8 % of the values have the
distance error less than 50 m. As reviewed in Sect. 1, the results show that our prediction can
provide assistance for these applications which include routing protocols, data dissemination
protocols, road congestion, and map localization are able to work with inaccurate localization.

4.3.3 Comparison with ANN

An ANN model is a model whose architecture essentially mimics the learning capability of
the human brain. The processing elements of an ANN resemble the biological structure of
neurons and the internal operation of a human brain. ANN is a non-linear, non-parametric
and data driven modeling approach. The main advantage of ANN is the ability to adapt
to imperfect data, nonlinearity, and arbiter function mapping. Moreover, a neural network
is better able to recognize the high level features, such as the serial correlation if any of a
training set [31]. Another major benefit of a neural network is that prior knowledge of the noise
distribution is not required. Noisy distance measurements can be used directly to train the
network with the actual coordinate locations. The neural network is capable of characterizing
the noise and compensating for it to obtain the accurate position. Ref. [32] showed that the
ANN method was the best performing model over the auto-regressive and moving average
model, exponential smoothing and multiple regression even for a small-sized training set and
a high level of random errors. Therefore, for performance comparisons, an established ANN
model is also applied for the predictions of location information to mobile nodes. We use a
traditional multi-layer feed-forward neural networks [33] for prediction location information
to mobile nodes. The details of ANN-based prediction are described in Ref. [32].
Figure 7 gives performance comparisons of our Kalman-based prediction algorithm on
different types of traffic traces. The data of x-axis 1, 2, 3, 4 represent trace INFATI, Shanghai,
Georgia, Freeway, respectively. MSEx and MSEy represent the MSE of the x- and the y-
coordinate time series, respectively; NMSEx and NMSEy represent the NMSE of the x- and
the y-coordinate time series, respectively. Figure 7 reveals the following results:

(1) Note that the NMSE of two prediction algorithms are very small. That is to say, Kalman-
based approach and neural network approach are all efficient for prediction node location
in VANETs. But all NMSE value for Kalman-based prediction is lower than that of ANN
except NMSEx for Shanghai trace.
(2) The average distance error value for seeing Kalman-based prediction is lower than that
of ANN for each mobility trace. These results show that the Kalman-based prediction
has better localization performance than ANN method.
(3) For INFATI and Georgia traces, all the MSE and NMSE of Kalman-based prediction are
lower than that of ANN. The Kalman-based prediction has a slightly better prediction
than ANN for both trace. For Shanghai trace, the Kalman-based prediction gives the lower
MSEy than ANN. But the MSEx of Kalman-based prediction is 3441.3080 and the value

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

6000 6000
Kalman−based prediction
ANN−based prediction (a) (b)

MSEy (m )
MSEx (m )
2

2
4000 4000
xticklabel trace
1 INFATI
2 Shanghai 2000 2000
3 Georgia
4 Freeway 0 0
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
trace trace
−3

average distance error (m)

x 10
0.03 8 80
(c) (d) (e)
6 60
0.02
NMSEx

NMSEy

4 40
0.01
2 20

0 0 0
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
trace trace trace
Fig. 7 Performance comparison between Kalman filter and ANN-based prediction

for ANN is 1990.6693, i.e. MSEx value for seeing Kalman-based prediction is higher
than that of ANN. This result cannot affect the superiority of Kalman-based prediction.
Because the average distance error value are 41.7869 and 44.7682, respectively. The
distance error value for Kalman-based prediction is lower that that of ANN. Comparing
to NMSE and MSE of the x- and the y-coordinate time series, the distance error play
a more important role in VANETs applications. Since the two vehicles communication
is directly affected by the distance between two vehicles. In a word, the Kalman-based
prediction approach outperforms the neural network technique.

4.3.4 Computational Complexity Comparison

The Kalman-based prediction as described in Fig. 1 involves many matrix multiplications

and an inverse operation for computing the Kalman gain K . These two operations have
complexity O(k 3 ) and as a result the Kalman filter is also of complexity O(k 3 ) where k is
the number of parameters in the state. When training multi-layer neural networks, there are
several factors that determine the computational complexity. it is assumed that the network is
fully connected. The variable i, n, o represents the number of input nodes, hidden nodes and
output nodes, respectively. The total order of complexity is O(i ∗ n ∗ o + n ∗ o) for training a
singe epoch [31]. In our experiment, the prediction algorithm is executed in MATLAB. The
kalman-based prediction spends less time than that of ANN. However, there are difficulties in
trying to compare Kalman filter with ANN [34]. This is because there are no features that are
shared between these two families of localizing methods. Another reason why it is difficult
to arrive at a generalized statement comparing the Kalman filter and ANN is because, the
scalability of the ANN is not known.The details of reason are discussed in Ref. [34].
Although these are some of the difficulties in attempting to definitively compare ANN
with the Kalman filter, the multi-layer neural network has a weaker self-adaptivity than the
Kalman filter. First, ANN perform well only for the area in which they have been trained.

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If the mobility node passes beyond the boundaries of the area where the neural network has
been trained, the ANN will not be able to localize. Second, when the information from which
the location measurements have been used to train the network are moved, the ANN needs to
be re-trained and there is a possibility that the architecture of the ANN may need to change.
On the other hand, the Kalman filter do not suffer from this problem and they can be used
freely over any area once the appropriate noise parameters have been measured [34].

5 Conclusions

This paper was trying to predict location of the mobile node in VANETs, relying on a new
method called Kalman filter that enables to use fundamental analysis of location information
with technical analysis. We evaluated the performance of location prediction using both real
vehicle mobility traces and model-driven traces. The extended experiments showed that the
proposed prediction method could achieve a higher degree of location performance. It could
be used in many applications such as routing protocols, data dissemination protocols, road
congestion, and map localization, etc.
Seeking a perfect prediction models is not the final goal. The final goal is focused on
optimizing VANETs performance. Further work will employ this prediction to many appli-
cations including routing protocols, data dissemination protocols, etc. In addition, we plan
to investigate an in-depth study on the performance of different prediction models with vari-
ous traces, seek a more accurate prediction for applications which requires very precise and
reliable localization systems.

Acknowledgments This work was supported in part by the NSFC under Grant Nos. 61363081 and 61072063,
the NSF of Gansu Province under Grant No. 1308RJZA294, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Gansu
Universities and NWNU-LKQN-11-4.

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Huifang Feng is a professor in School of Mathematics and Statistics

at Northwest Normal University, China. She received the B.S. degree
in mathematics from Northwest Normal University in 1993, the M.S.
degree in computer science from Lanzhou University in 1996, and
Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tianjin University in 2006. Her
research interests are focused on modeling, analysis and performance
evaluation of computer communication networks, traffic characteriza-
tion, prediction, and other traffic engineering issues in both Wired and
wireless network.

Chunfeng Liu is an instructor in School of Computer Science and

Technology at Tianjin University, China. She received her Ph.D. degree
in computer science from Tianjin University in 2009. Her research
interests wireless ad hoc networks, game theory, modeling, analysis
and performance evaluation of computer communication networks, and
network security.

Yantai Shu is a professor in School of Computer Science and Tech-

nology at Tianjin University, China. He is a member of the IEEE and
the ACM. He has published more than 120 papers and contributed to
one book. His current interests are focused on computer communica-
tion networks, wireless networks, real-time systems, modeling and sim-
ulation.

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Location Prediction of Vehicles in VANETs Using A Kalman Filter

Oliver W. W. Yang received the PhD degree in electrical engineer-

ing from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He is a profes-
sor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at
the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has worked for Northern
Telecom Canada Ltd. and has done various consulting. He has served
on the editorial board of IEEE Communication Magazine, and IEEE
Commun. Surveys & Tutorials, as well as an associate director of the
OCIECE (Ottawa-Carleton Institute of Electrical and Computer Engi-
neering). His research interests are in the modeling, analysis, and per-
formance evaluation of computer communication networks, their proto-
cols, services, and interconnection architectures. The CCNR Lab under
his leadership has been working on various projects in the switch archi-
tecture, traffic control, traffic characterization, and other traffic engi-
neering issues in both wireless and photonic networks, the results of
which can be found in more than 400 technical papers.

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