Distributed bounding of feasible sets in cooperative wireless network positioning

Locations of target nodes in cooperative wireless sensor networks can be confined to a number of feasible sets in certain situations, e.g., when the estimated distances between sensors are larger than the actual distances. Quantifying feasible sets is often challenging in cooperative positioning. In this letter, we propose an iterative technique to cooperatively outer approximate the feasible sets containing the locations of the target nodes. We first outer approximate a feasible set including a target node location by an ellipsoid. Then, we extend the ellipsoid with the measured distances between sensor nodes and obtain larger ellipsoids. The larger ellipsoids are used to determine the intersections containing other targets. Simulation results show that the proposed technique converges after a small number of iterations.