Cooperative Indoor Position Location Using Reflected Estimations

Indoor positioning has become a hot research topic due to a plethora of interesting applications ranging from emergency responder tracking to location-based services. In this work we focus on the problem of network localization, sometimes called collaborative localization, where a network of nodes is to be localized using both connections to anchors (when they exist) and connections between unlocalized nodes. The fast and efficient IPPM algorithm developed in T. Jia, R. Buehrer, "A set-theoretic approach to collaborative position location for wireless networks", performs well in most situations. However, it suffers from the existence of local, non-global minima which cause large localization error. In this work, we propose a technique for identifying and mitigating local minima errors, and we show that both non-collaborative and collaborative position location estimates can be greatly improved using our method.