A gossip-based TDOA distributed localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Distributed localization has been established as a key problem in wireless sensor networks and many localization algorithms have been proposed in this area. In this paper, a novel distributed TDOA passive localization method based on gossip algorithms is proposed, which can obviously improve the performance of the previous algorithms. According to our numerical results, adding the gossip mechanism into the TDOA localization frame not only significantly improves the positioning accuracy, but also contributes to the situation that all the beacon nodes acquire the same coordinates of the target sensor node which we call it reaches a distributed average consensus for all the beacon nodes. This is sometimes very useful for special applications such as military precision strike and illegal radio station positioning. We compared the newly designed localization algorithms with the classical Taylor-series estimation algorithm for TDOA localization, and the numerical results are also provided to prove the effectiveness and advantage of our novel algorithm.