We consider the problem of localizing wireless devices in an ad-hoc network embedded in a d-dimensional Euclidean space. Obtaining a good estimation of where wireless devices are located is crucial in wireless network applications including environment monitoring, geographic routing and topology control. When the positions of the devices are unknown and only local distance information is given, we need to infer the positions from these local distance measurements. This problem is particularly challenging when we only have access to measurements that have limited accuracy and are incomplete. We consider the extreme case of this limitation on the available information, namely only the connectivity information is available, i.e., we only know whether a pair of nodes is within a fixed detection range of each other or not, and no information is known about how far apart they are. Further, to account for detection failures, we assume that even if a pair of devices is within the detection range, it fails to detect the presence of one another with some probability and this probability of failure depends on how far apart those devices are. Given this limited information, we investigate the performance of a centralized positioning algorithm MDS-MAP introduced by , and a distributed positioning algorithm, introduced by , called HOP-TERRAIN. In particular, for a network consisting of n devices positioned randomly, we provide a bound on the resulting error for both algorithms. We show that the error is bounded, decreasing at a rate that is proportional to R Rc, where Rc is the critical detection range when the resulting random network starts to be connected, and R is the detection range of each device.
Our first result, specifically the analysis of MDS-MAP , has a similar flavour as in @cite_17 . We provide a theoretical guarantee that backs up experimental results. We use shortest paths as our primary guess for the missing entries in the distance matrix and apply MDS to find the topology of the network. In contrast to @cite_17 , we require weaker assumptions for our results. More specifically, we assume that only neighbouring sensors have information about each other and that only connectivity information is known. Furthermore, the knowledge of detection probabilities plays no role in our analysis or the algorithm. And last, in our analysis we assume that the average degree grows logarithmically-not linearly- with the number of sensors, which results in needing many less revealed entries in the distance matrix. In particular, the last condition is quite realistic: If the average degree grows any slower then the network is not even connected (more on this issue in ). As the shortest paths algorithm works for both rage-free and range-aware cases, our analysis includes both and provides the first error bounds on the performance of MDS-MAP .
@cite_17
2101191125
It is often useful to know the geographic positions of nodes in a communications network, but adding GPS receivers or other sophisticated sensors to every node can be expensive. MDS-MAP is a recent localization method based on multidimensional scaling (MDS). It uses connectivity information - who is within communications range of whom - to derive the locations of the nodes in the network, and can take advantage of additional data, such as estimated distances between neighbors or known positions for certain anchor nodes, if they are available. However, MDS-MAP is an inherently centralized algorithm and is therefore of limited utility in many applications. In this paper, we present a new variant of the MDS-MAP method, which we call MDS-MAP(P) standing for MDS-MAP using patches of relative maps, that can be executed in a distributed fashion. Using extensive simulations, we show that the new algorithm not only preserves the good performance of the original method on relatively uniform layouts, but also performs much better than the original on irregularly-shaped networks. The main idea is to build a local map at each node of the immediate vicinity and then merge these maps together to form a global map. This approach works much better for topologies in which the shortest path distance between two nodes does not correspond well to their Euclidean distance. We also discuss an optional refinement step that improves solution quality even further at the expense of additional computation.