TW-TOA Based Positioning in the Presence of Clock Imperfections

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel suboptimal estimators for TW-TOA based positioning in asynchronous wireless sensor networks, effectively handling clock imperfections and demonstrating high performance through simulations.

Contribution

It proposes two new estimators for TW-TOA positioning that address clock imperfections, using trust region and DCP methods for improved accuracy.

Findings

Both estimators outperform traditional methods in simulations.

The DCP approach shows particularly high accuracy.

The trust region method can be solved exactly under mild conditions.

Abstract

This paper studies the positioning problem based on two-way time-of-arrival (TW-TOA) measurements in asynchronous wireless sensor networks. Since the optimal estimator for this problem involves difficult nonconvex optimization, we propose two suboptimal estimators based on squared-range least squares and least absolute mean of residual errors. The former approach is formulated as a general trust region subproblem which can be solved exactly under mild conditions. The latter approach is formulated as a difference of convex functions programming (DCP), which can be solved using a concave-convex procedure. Simulation results illustrate the high performance of the proposed techniques, especially for the DCP approach.