Controlling error propagation in mobile-infrastructure based localization

Abstract

Iterative localization is one of the common schemes for obtaining locations of unknown sensor nodes when anchor nodes are relatively sparse in the network. The key idea is for a node to localize itself using its anchor neighbors, and then become an anchor for other unknown neighbors. The process continues until all nodes are localized or no nodes left can be localized. The major problem of the iterative localization scheme is that it suffers from the negative effect of error propagation, where sensor noise results in estimation errors which then get accumulated and amplified over localization iterations.

This paper proposes a computationally efficient error control mechanism to mitigate the error propagation effect for mobile-infrastructure-based localization. In particular, we show how the error can be characterized and controlled in a mobile-assistant localization framework with angle-of-arrival type of sensing modality. Both simulation on a large scale and real experiments on a small scale have been conducted. Results have shown that our error control mechanism achieves comparable location accuracy as global optimization-based localization methods and has the advantage of being much more computationally efficient.