Analysis of Flip Ambiguities in Distributed Network Localization

Accurate self-localization capability is highly desirable in wireless sensor networks. A major problem in trilateration based wireless sensor network localization that may introduce large errors in the location estimates is flip ambiguity. Recently the notion of robust quadrilaterals has been introduced as a way to identify possible flip ambiguities that otherwise corrupt localization computations. In this paper, we provide a formal geometric analysis of flip ambiguity problems using similar notions. The two main objectives of the paper are filling some technical gaps in the recent relevant works and developing a generic formal method for quantifying the likelihood of suffering from flip ambiguities for arbitrary sensor neighborhood geometries.