Multi-sensor data fusion methods for indoor localization under collinear ambiguity

Sensor node localization in mobile ad-hoc sensor networks is a challenging problem. Often, the anchor nodes tend to line up in a linear fashion in a mobile sensor network when nodes are deployed in an ad-hoc manner. This paper discusses novel node localization methods under the conditions of collinear ambiguity of the anchors. Additionally, the work presented herein also describes a methodology to fuse data available from multiple sensors for improved localization performance under conditions of collinear ambiguity. In this context, data is first acquired from multiple sensors sensing different modalities. The data acquired from each sensor is used to compute attenuation models for each sensor. Subsequently, a combined multi-sensor attenuation model is developed. The fusion methodology uses a joint error optimization approach on the multi-sensor data. The distance between each sensor node and anchor is itself computed using the differential power principle. These distances are used in the localization of sensor nodes under the condition of collinear ambiguity of anchors. Localization error analysis is also carried out in indoor conditions and compared with the Cramer–Rao lower bound. Experimental results on node localization using simulations and real field deployments indicate reasonable improvements in terms of localization accuracy when compared to methods likes MLAR and MGLR.