Localization of Wireless Sensors via Nuclear Norm for Rank Minimization

The low rank feature of location estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) makes it feasible to use nuclear norm minimization as an accurate and fast solution for low-dimensional embedding problems. In this paper, a novel localization algorithm for WSNs is proposed by using nuclear norm for rank minimization. We formulate the location finding problem from only a small fraction of random entries of Euclidean Distance Matrix (EDM) as a low-rank matrix recovery problem, subject to a set of linear equality constraints. We show that a measurement matrix using orthogonal projection obeys the RIP and thus, supports a sufficient condition for the recovery of the low-rank matrix with overwhelming probability. For simplicity, Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) algorithm, a standard convex optimization approach, is used for the nuclear norm minimization. Simulation results demonstrate that in a 100 m × 100 m area, for a small scale network with 100 nodes, only 20% of measurements is needed to achieve a 0.5 m localization error, while 3% needed to achieve a 0.05 m error for a comparatively large scale network with 1000 nodes.