Achieving high-accuracy distributed localization in sensor networks

Accurate, distributed localization algorithms are needed for a wide variety of wireless sensor network applications. This paper introduces a scalable, distributed weighted-multidimensional scaling (dwMDS) algorithm that adaptively emphasizes the most accurate range measurements available and naturally accounts for communication constraints within the sensor network. For received signal-strength (RSS) based range measurements, we demonstrate via simulation that location estimates are nearly unbiased with variance close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB). Further, RSS and time-of-arrival (TOA) channel measurements are used to demonstrate performance as good as the centralized maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) in a real-world sensor network.