OFDM-based ranging approach for vehicular safety applications

The basic foundation to enable safety-of-life applications in vehicular environments is the precise localization and path prediction of other road users in range. Currently available technologies like radar, camera or global positioning systems cannot meet most of the stringent requirements in terms of accuracy, reliability, update rate, and low outage probability imposed by this kind of applications. Radio based ranging methods using active transponders have already demonstrated their appealing capabilities like a low probability of outage and a very high range accuracy, even in multipath and non-line of sight conditions in urban areas. In order to allow full integration of such a system into IEEE 802.11p transceiver hardware and compatibility with existing Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure applications, a method for range estimation based on orthogonal frequency modulated data symbols is described in this paper and a computationally simple implementation is presented.