A GPS-free method for vehicle future movement directions prediction using SOM for VANET

摘要

Predicting the next movement directions, which will be chosen by the vehicle driver at each junction of a road network, can be used largely in VANET (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network) applications. The current methods are based on GPS. In a number of VANET applications the GPS service is faced with some obstacles such as high-rise buildings, tunnels, and trees. In this paper, a GPS-free method is proposed to predict the vehicle future movement direction. In this method, vehicle motion paths are described by using the sequence of turning directions on the junctions, and the distances between the junctions. Movement patterns of the vehicles are extracted through clustering of the vehicle’s motion paths using SOM (Self Organizing Map). These patterns are then used for predicting the next movement direction, which will be chosen by the driver at the next junction. The obtained results indicate that our GPS-free method is comparable with the GPS-based methods, while having more advantages in different applications regarding urban traffic.