Real traffic-data based evaluation of vehicular traffic environment and state- of-the-art with future issues in location-centric data dissemination for VANETs

Extensive investigation has been performed in location-centric or geocast routing protocols for reliable and efficient dissemination of information in Vehicular Adhoc Networks （VANETs）. Various location-centric routing protocols have been suggested in literature for road safety ITS applications considering urban and highway traffic environment. This paper characterizes vehicular environments based on real traffic data and investigates the evolution of location-centric data dissemination. The current study is carded out with three main objectives： （i） to analyze the impact of dynamic traffic environment on the design of data dissemination techniques, （ii） to characterize location-centric data dissemination in terms of functional and qualitative behavior of protocols, properties, and strengths and weaknesses, and （iii） to find some future research directions in information dissemination based on location. Vehicular traffic environments have been classified into three categories based on physical characteristics such as speed, inter-vehicular distance, neighborhood stability, traffic volume, etc. Real traffic data is considered to analyze on-road traffic environments based on the measurement of physical parameters and weather conditions. Design issues are identified in incorporating physical parameters and weather conditions into data dissemination. Functional and qualitative characteristics of location-centric techniques are explored considering urban and highway environments. Comparative analysis of location-centric techniques is carded out for both urban and highway environments individually based on some unique and common characteristics of the environments. Finally, some future research directions are identified in the area based on the detailed investigation of traffic environments and location-centric data dissemination techniques.

Astrometric calibration of the Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anti-center(XSTPS-GAC)

Abstract We present astrometric calibration of the Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anti-center （XSTPS-GAC）. XSTPS-GAC is the photometric part of the Digital Sky Survey of the Galactic Anti-center （DSS-GAC）, which is a photometric and spectroscopic sky survey, in combination with LAMOST. In order to select an astrometric reference catalog, we made comparisons between the four widely used astrometric catalogs, GSC2.3, USNO-B1.0, UCAC3 and PPMXL. PPMXL shows relatively small systematic errors in positions and more homogeneous proper motion distributions toward the Galactic Anti-center （GAC）, and was selected as the reference catalog. Based on the high quality and bright reference stars that were picked out from PPMXL, we performed a 4th-order polynomial fitting in image units, to construct the transformation relation between coordinates used by XSTPS-GAC and standard coordinates, and to simultaneously correct the image distortions in the CCD. Then we applied the derived relation to all sources to obtain their mean celestial coordinates based on the Intemational Celestial Reference System. For bright point sources with r 〈 17.0 mag, the accuracy of astrometric calibration could reach about 80 mas for each of the g, r, i bands, with systematic errors being less than 10 mas. But for the faint sources at the brightness limit of the survey, which was r - 19.0 mag, the accuracy can still reach 200 mas. After combining all observations, the final weighted average coordinates could reach an accuracy of less than 70 mas for bright stars. For faint stars, the rms residuals of weighted coordinates decrease to -110 mas. The final combined XSTPS-GAC coordinates show a good consistency with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Candidate members of star clusters from LAMOST DR2

In this work, we provide 2189 photometrically- and kinematically-selected candidate members of 24 star clusters from the LAMOST DR2 catalog. We perform two-step membership identification： selection along the stellar track in the colormagnitude diagram, i.e., photometric identification, and selection from the distribution of radial velocities, i.e. the kinematic identification. We find that the radial velocities from the LAMOST data are very helpful in the membership identification. The mean probability of membership is 40% for the sample selected with radial velocity. With these 24 star clusters, we investigate the performance of the radial velocity and metallicity estimated with the LAMOST pipeline. We find that the systematic offsets in radial velocity and metallicity are 0.85 ± 1.26 km s-1and-0.08 ± 0.04 dex, with dispersions of 5.47＋1.16-0.71 km s-1and 0.13＋0.04-0.02 dex, respectively. Finally, we propose that the photometrically-selected candidate members of the clusters covered by the LAMOST footprint should be assigned higher priority so that more candidate stars can be observed.