Modeling and Analyzing Single Anchor Localization for Internet of Things

Localization has drawn much attention in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Under traditional multilateration techniques, existing solutions usually need multiple anchor nodes to perform localization, which introduces more system complexity and cost. In this paper, the single anchor localization (SAL) is first modeled, where a multi-antenna anchor node is able to estimate the location of the target node using both angle and distance information. Then, according to SAL, we propose an accurate and distributed localization (ADL) algorithm, which can not only estimate the location of the target node with fewer anchor nodes but also be more accurate than the traditional multilateration method. Furthermore, we prove that the location estimate under ADL can converge towards the real location of the target node with probability 1. The lower and upper bounds of ADL are also derived under a bounded noise model. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance of ADL and the correctness of the theoretical results.