Mobility-Assisted Node Localization Based on TOA Measurements Without Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proposed for a multitude of location-dependent applications. To stamp the collected data and facilitate communication protocols, it is necessary to identify the location of each sensor. In this paper, we discuss the performance of two novel positioning schemes, which use two generalized geometrical localization algorithms to achieve an accurate estimation based on time-ofarrival (TOA) measurements without time synchronization. In order to improve the network performance and address the limitations of static WSNs on position estimation, a mobile anchor is utilized effectively and two attractive movement strategies for mobile anchor are designed accordingly. The effectiveness of our approaches is validated and compared with H. Chen (B) Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: hongyang@mcl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp B. Liu Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA P. Huang Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA J. Liang School of Automation and Information Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, China Y. Gu Information Systems Architecture Science Research Division, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan the traditional Trilateration method by extensive simulations.