Real-time Cooperative Vehicle Tracking in VANETs

In recent years, vehicle tracking using a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), where vehicular connectivity is supported by both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, has attracted considerable attention. Vehicle tracking is useful in a variety of applications, such as traffic management, collecting vehicle trajectory data, stolen car recovery and in the pursuit of an illegal runaway vehicle. Some of these applications require real-time and uninterrupted vehicle tracking. The unpredictable movement of the target vehicle and uneven spatial distribution of vehicles that participate in the tracking process make real-time and uninterrupted vehicle tracking challenging. In this paper, we propose a cooperative method to track target vehicles in real time by using VANETs. In our method, vehicles and road side units (RSUs) cooperate to track the location of target vehicles. In order to achieve the uninterrupted tracking of a target vehicle, a tracker broadcasts a handoff request message to its surrounding vehicles before losing the target. We implement the proposed method in a network simulator and evaluate its effectiveness and performance. Our simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve efficient and uninterrupted real-time vehicle tracking.