Cooperative Source Node Tracking in Non-Line-of-Sight Environments

The accuracy of localization is highly degraded in indoor and harsh environments where source nodes either do not have connections with a sufficient number of anchor nodes due to strong attenuation or have very poor range estimates due to NLOS propagation. Cooperative localization is a technique in which the source nodes communicate not only with the anchor nodes, but also with each other. Hence, the source nodes can collect several additional measurements which significantly improve the localization performance. Although many studies have examined NLOS-degraded localization of a static node in noncooperative networks, and many others have examined the impact of cooperation for static localization, there is no work which considers cooperative tracking of mobile nodes. To address this open problem, in this work, we examine cooperative tracking, particularly in NLOS environments. More specifically, we develop a novel sensor tracking algorithm based on semidefinite programming (SDP) which has the ability to mitigate NLOS propagation. Our simulations show that the new SDP-based tracking algorithm outperforms the classic extended Kalman filter as well as the other recently proposed algorithms for noncooperative tracking in NLOS environments. We also show that the algorithm can be extended to cooperative networks, and that a substantial performance benefit is realized by cooperation.