Mobile Location in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Multi Spot Measurements Model

The localization of sensors in wireless sensor networks has recently gained considerable attention. The existing location methods are based on a one-spot measurement model. It is difficult to further improve the positioning accuracy of existing location methods based on single-spot measurements. This paper proposes two location methods based on multi-spot measurements to reduce location errors. Because the multi-spot measurements model has more measurement equations than the single-spot measurements model, the proposed methods provide better performance than the traditional location methods using one-spot measurement in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE) and Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB). Both closed-form and iterative algorithms are proposed in this paper. The former performs suboptimally with less computational burden, whereas the latter has the highest positioning accuracy in attaining the CRLB. Moreover, a novel CRLB for the proposed multi-spot measurements model is also derived in this paper. A theoretical proof shows that the traditional CRLB in the case of single-spot measurements performs worse than the proposed CRLB in the case of multi-spot measurements. The simulation results show that the proposed methods have a lower RMSE than the traditional location methods.