Cooperative-cum-Constrained Maximum Likelihood algorithm for UWB-based localization in wireless BANs

Wireless Body Area Network (BAN) is a mainstream technology for numerous application fields (medicine, security, sport science…) and precise determination of wireless sensors´ positions responses to the great needs in many applications. In addition, Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio is an attractive technology to achieve the centimeter-level distance measurements. However, the aggregation of the distance information remains a challenge and this paper presents a cutting-edge method for performing the accurate localization in wireless BAN. To this aim, by fully exploiting its unique features, a novel Cooperative-cum- Constrained Maximum Likelihood (CCML) localization algorithm is developed. Simulation results and UWB-based platform validation show absolute agreement with theoretical prediction and improvement over previous studies by Hamie et al and Mekonnen et al.