Localization of static target in WSNs with least-squares and extended Kalman filter

Abstract

Wireless sensor network localization is an essential problem that has attracted increasing attention due to wide requirements such as in-door navigation, autonomous vehicle, intrusion detection, and so on. With the a priori knowledge of the positions of sensor nodes and their measurements to targets in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), i.e. posterior knowledge, such as distance and angle measurements, it is possible to estimate the position of targets through different algorithms. In this contribution, two approaches based on least-squares and Kalman filter are described for localization of one static target in the WSNs with distance, angle, or both distance and angle measurements, respectively. Noting that the measurements of these sensors are generally noisy of certain degree, it is crucial and interesting to analyze how the accuracy of localization is affected by the sensor errors and the sensor network, which may help to provide guideline on choosing the specification of sensors and designing the sensor network. To this end, we make theoretical analysis for the different methods based on three types of measurement noise: bounded noise, uniformly distributed noises, and Gaussian white noises. Simulation results illustrate the performance comparison of these different methods.