Angle of arrival localization in wireless sensor networks with inaccurate anchor positions

Abstract

Angle of arrival based localization has been widely applied in wireless sensor network due to its easy access of measurements and simple system structure. In previous work, the positions of anchor nodes are generally assumed precisely known, which is an important condition in addition to the angle of arrival measurements. However, in practice, anchor positions are obtained by Global Positioning System or other localization methods, which inevitably suffer from errors. These errors, leading to inaccurate anchor positions, have heavy impact on the localization result. Although there are a few studies on the errors of anchor position in wireless localization, they mainly focus on range based measurements. In this paper, we study angle of arrival based localization with inaccurate anchor positions. Stemming from the maximum likelihood estimation, a novel semidefinite programming method is proposed by using tight approximation and proper relaxation. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed method provides much better performance in terms of localization accuracy, compared to some existing methods.