A distributed positioning algorithm for cooperative active and passive sensors

The problem of positioning a target node is studied for wireless sensor networks with cooperative active and passive sensors. Two-way time-of-arrival and time-difference-of-arrival measurements made by both active and passive nodes are used to estimate the position of the target node. A maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) can be employed to solve the problem. Due to the nonlinear nature of the cost function in the MLE, an iterative search might converge to local minima which often results in large estimation errors. To avoid this drawback, we instead formulate the problem of positioning as finding the intersection of a number of convex sets derived from measurements. To obtain this intersection, we apply the projection onto convex sets approach, which is robust and can be implemented in a distributed manner. Simulations are performed to compare the performance of the MLE and the proposed method.