Distributed Ranging and Localization for Wireless Networks via Compressed Sensing

Location-based services in a wireless network require nodes to know their locations accurately. Conventional solutions rely on contention-based medium access, where only one node can successfully transmit at any time in any neighborhood. In this paper, a novel, complete, distributed ranging and localization solution is proposed, which let all nodes in the network broadcast their location estimates and measure distances to all neighbors simultaneously. An on-off signaling is designed to overcome the physical half-duplex constraint. In each iteration, all nodes transmit simultaneously, each broadcasting codewords describing the current location estimate. From the superposed signals from all neighbors, each node decodes their neighbors' locations and also estimates their distances using the signal strengths. The node then broadcasts its improved location estimates in the subsequent iteration. Simulations demonstrate accurate localization throughout a large network over a few thousand symbol intervals, suggesting much higher efficiency than conventional schemes based on ALOHA or CSMA.