  Absolute positioning of vehicles is based on Global Navigation Satellite
Systems (GNSS) combined with on-board sensors and high-resolution maps. In
Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS), the positioning
performance can be augmented by means of vehicular networks that enable
vehicles to share location-related information. This paper presents an Implicit
Cooperative Positioning (ICP) algorithm that exploits the Vehicle-to-Vehicle
(V2V) connectivity in an innovative manner, avoiding the use of explicit V2V
measurements such as ranging. In the ICP approach, vehicles jointly localize
non-cooperative physical features (such as people, traffic lights or inactive
cars) in the surrounding areas, and use them as common noisy reference points
to refine their location estimates. Information on sensed features are fused
through V2V links by a consensus procedure, nested within a message passing
algorithm, to enhance the vehicle localization accuracy. As positioning does
not rely on explicit ranging information between vehicles, the proposed ICP
method is amenable to implementation with off-the-shelf vehicular communication
hardware. The localization algorithm is validated in different traffic
scenarios, including a crossroad area with heterogeneous conditions in terms of
feature density and V2V connectivity, as well as a real urban area by using
Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) for traffic data generation. Performance
results show that the proposed ICP method can significantly improve the vehicle
location accuracy compared to the stand-alone GNSS, especially in harsh
environments, such as in urban canyons, where the GNSS signal is highly
degraded or denied.
