Situational awareness in vehicular networks could be substantially improved
utilizing reliable trajectory prediction methods. More precise situational
awareness, in turn, results in notably better performance of critical safety
applications, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), as well as comfort
applications like Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). Therefore,
vehicle trajectory prediction problem needs to be deeply investigated in order
to come up with an end to end framework with enough precision required by the
safety applications' controllers. This problem has been tackled in the
literature using different methods. However, machine learning, which is a
promising and emerging field with remarkable potential for time series
prediction, has not been explored enough for this purpose. In this paper, a
two-layer neural network-based system is developed which predicts the future
values of vehicle parameters, such as velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate, in
the first layer and then predicts the two-dimensional, i.e. longitudinal and
lateral, trajectory points based on the first layer's outputs. The performance
of the proposed framework has been evaluated in realistic cut-in scenarios from
Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) dataset and the results show a noticeable
improvement in the prediction accuracy in comparison with the kinematics model
which is the dominant employed model by the automotive industry. Both ideal and
nonideal communication circumstances have been investigated for our system
evaluation. For non-ideal case, an estimation step is included in the framework
before the parameter prediction block to handle the drawbacks of packet drops
or sensor failures and reconstruct the time series of vehicle parameters at a
desirable frequency