Distributed TOA-Based Positioning in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Potential Game Approach

In this letter, we solve the problem of positioning based on the time-of-arrival technique in wireless sensor networks. Different from the traditional estimation methods, the position of a target node is considered as a strategy of anchor nodes, and the cognition information is introduced to enrich positional information. After proposing the concept of consensus of cognition and consensus of measurements, we re-investigate the positioning problem from a game-theoretic perspective. It is proved that the proposed game is an exact potential game, which exhibits attractive properties about the Nash equilibrium (NE). Then, the best response algorithm is used to achieve the NE point. The simulation results indicate that the performance of positioning with a suitable tradeoff parameter is better than the performance of recursive least-squares algorithm in terms of positional accuracy and convergence rate.