Probabilistic Cooperative Location Estimation in Wireless Networks

Applications of location estimation have drawn lots of interests in recent years. Many schemes have been developed to estimate the locations of the concerned users. Conventionally, the location of each user is estimated independently by its own observations from the local environment. In this paper, we propose a cooperative location estimation scheme. From the encounter history of a specific user meeting other users and the location estimation results of other users, the user is able to further improve the accuracy of its location estimation. Simulation results show that the cooperative algorithm provides a significant gain over the non-cooperative scheme and the location estimation accuracy increases with the number of users involved in cooperation.