Energy-efficient mobile tracking in heterogeneous networks using node selection

Range-based positioning is capable of achieving better accuracy in heterogeneous networks, where mobile nodes enabled with multiple radio access technologies are allowed to deploy not only the faraway access points but also high spatial density peer nodes as anchor nodes. However, due to peer node energy supply constraint and network capacity constraint, an efficient cooperation strategy is required. In this paper, we propose a cooperation method to track the position of a moving target with high accuracy and reduce the energy consumption and signaling overhead via node selection. It is demonstrated by simulation that in a specific practical scenario, the proposed method is capable of reducing the signaling overhead by about 34% to within 0.5-m degradation of accuracy compared to exhaustive cooperation. We also evaluate the achievable performance averaged over randomly located node configurations and compare the proposed scheme with the mostly used nearest-node selection algorithm in terms of accuracy and cost.