EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 93043, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/93043

Autonomous Positioning Techniques Based on Cramér-Rao Lower Bound Analysis

Mats Rydström,1 Andreu Urruela,2 Erik G. Ström,1 and Arne Svensson1

1Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona 08034, Spain
2Department of Signals and Systems, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg SE-412 96, Sweden

Received 31 May 2005; Revised 6 October 2005; Accepted 11 October 2005

Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We consider the problem of autonomously locating a number of asynchronous sensor nodes in a wireless network. A strong focus lies on reducing the processing resources needed to solve the relative positioning problem, an issue of great interest in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. In the first part of the paper, based on a well-known derivation of the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the asynchronous sensor positioning problem, we are able to construct optimal preprocessing methods for sensor clock-offset cancellation. A cancellation of unknown clock-offsets from the asynchronous positioning problem reduces processing requirements, and, under certain reasonable assumptions, allows for statistically efficient distributed positioning algorithms. Cramér-Rao lower bound theory may also be used for estimating the performance of a positioning algorithm. In the second part of this paper, we exploit this property in developing a distributed algorithm, where the global positioning problem is solved suboptimally, using a divide-and-conquer approach of low complexity. The performance of this suboptimal algorithm is evaluated through computer simulation, and compared to previously published algorithms.