Joint power and bandwidth allocation in cooperative wireless localization networks

Localization of wireless node is a key feature in many applications. Traditional localization has exploited the signal runtime between “agent” nodes that are to be localized and a set of “anchor” nodes with known position. Recently, cooperative localization that also uses runtime measurement between agent nodes has been shown to provide superior performance. This paper analyzes the optimum power and bandwidth allocation in such systems. We first formulate the general optimization problem and show that it is non-convex. We then develop an approximate algorithm based on Taylor expansion and iterative optimization of power and bandwidth separately to find an approximate solution; simulations show that results are close to the optimum solution (which is NP-hard). We also find that the importance of cooperative localization increases (and agents get assigned more resources) if the anchor deployment is bad in the sense that it provides high geometric dilution of precision and/or suffers from significant blockage between anchors and agents.