GLOVE’s manifesto: leveraging GNSS time-space information to improve VANETs’ performances and enrich VANETs’ services

GLOVE [1] is a European project (funded by the GNSS Supervisory Authority) which addresses the mutual benefits coming from the cross-domain integration between GNSSs (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) – in particular Galileo - and VANETs (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks) based on ITS-G5 [2]. Such integration is already foreseen on vehicular On-Board Units (OBUs), but has not been extensively studied. GLOVE proposes to leverage the two technologies (VANETs and Galileo) to better cope with some well-known weaknesses of current VANETs, to improve positioning and to deliver new interactive services to the driver. The problem is split into three steps, corresponding to the functional blocks constituting the overall GLOVE OBU: a GNSS receiver (OBUg) suitable to receive Galileo signals and to exploit SBAS (Satellite Based Augmentation System) corrections (e.g. provided by EGNOS or EDAS), integrating also information other than GNSS signals (e.g. from VANET domain); a VANET transceiver/router (OBUv) benefiting as much as possible from both time and space information; a block (OBU^) performing the integration between GNSS and VANET data, expected to improve existing vehicular services and to enable novel ones. The project, started in October 2012, has already entered the analysis of the possible VANETs and GNSS’s weaknesses which the proposed architecture may address. Here some preliminary results are presented.