Rank-One Semidefinite Programming Solutions for Mobile Source Localization in Sensor Networks

In this paper, we introduce a rank-one Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) solution method for mobile source localization in sensor networks. The position and velocity of mobile source are jointly estimated using Time Delay (TD) measurements. To obtain the position and velocity of mobile source, a Relaxed Semi-Definite Programming (RSDP) algorithm is firstly designed by dropping the rank-one constraint. However, dropping the rank-one constraint leads to produce a suboptimal solution. To improve the performance, we further put forward the Penalty Function Semi-Definite Programming (PF-SDP) method to obtain the rank-one solution of the estimation problem by introducing the penalty terms. By adaptively choosing the penalty coefficient, an Adaptive Penalty Function Semi-Definite Programming (APF-SDP) algorithm is also proposed to avoid the excessive penalty. We also conduct experiments in both a simulated environment and a real system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results have demonstrated that the proposed APF-SDP outperforms the PF-SDP in terms of the position and velocity estimation whether the noise level is large or not.