On geometric upper bounds for positioning algorithms in wireless sensor networks

This paper studies the possibility of upper bounding the position error for range-based positioning algorithms in wireless sensor networks. In this study, we argue that in certain situations when the measured distances between sensor nodes have positive errors, e.g., in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, the target node is confined to a closed bounded convex set (a feasible set) which can be derived from the measurements. Then, we formulate two classes of geometric upper bounds with respect to the feasible set. If an estimate is available, either feasible or infeasible, the position error can be upper bounded as the maximum distance between the estimate and any point in the feasible set (the first bound). Alternatively, if an estimate given by a positioning algorithm is always feasible, the maximum length of the feasible set is an upper bound on position error (the second bound). These bounds are formulated as nonconvex optimization problems. To progress, we relax the nonconvex problems and obtain convex problems, which can be efficiently solved. Simulation results show that the proposed bounds are reasonably tight in many situations, especially for NLOS conditions

Cooperative Wireless Sensor Network Positioning via Implicit Convex Feasibility

We propose a distributed positioning algorithm to estimate the unknown positions of a number of target nodes, given distance measurements between target nodes and between target nodes and number of reference nodes at known positions. Based on a geometric interpretation, we formulate the positioning problem as an implicit convex feasibility problem in which some of the sets depend on the unknown target positions, and apply a parallel projection onto convex sets approach to estimate the unknown target node positions. The proposed technique is suitable for parallel implementation in which every target node in parallel can update its position and share the estimate of its location with other targets. We mathematically prove convergence of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results reveal enhanced performance for the proposed approach compared to available techniques based on projections, especially for sparse networks