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

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Abstract

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-of-arrival (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 the traditional Trilateration method by extensive simulations.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. Part of this work was presented at IEEE ICPADS’08 [5].

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Correspondence to Hongyang Chen.

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Chen, H., Liu, B., Huang, P. et al. Mobility-Assisted Node Localization Based on TOA Measurements Without Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks. Mobile Netw Appl 17, 90–99 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-010-0281-3

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