Stacked Autoencoders-Based Localization Without Ranging Over Internet of Things

Abstract

Location information plays an important role in many applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). The low cost and ease of scalability of range-free localization algorithms have attracted the attention of many researchers, but the performance of many localization algorithms available in the literature varies greatly in different networks. Specifically, algorithms designed for anisotropic networks may not perform well in isotropic networks, and vice versa. To improve localization accuracy in both isotropic and anisotropic networks, a novel range-free localization algorithm named LSAE is proposed in this article, oriented to the network positioning without ranging over the IoT. The proposed algorithm utilizes the known information in the network, namely, the hop counts and distances between anchor nodes, to train the stacked autoencoders (SAE) model. In this way, it achieves accurate prediction of the distances between unknown nodes and anchor nodes. To further improve the localization accuracy, the disadvantage of the least square method is analyzed, and a novel coordinate estimation method based on the statistical results of distance estimation errors is proposed. We conducted a huge number of numerical simulations with and without the impact of multiple anisotropic factors in three different types of networks. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms treating the impact of multiple anisotropic factors, and demonstrates the high accuracy and robustness.