A Refined Localization Method for Underwater Tetherless Sensor Networks

An accurate localization scheme is essential to many underwater sensor applications. However, due to the persistent existence of uncertainties and measurement errors, an accurate localization is very difficult to achieve. The communication cost is much higher in underwater networks compared to terrestrial networks and this calls for more accurate localization schemes even if they involve more computational burden. In the paper, a scheme based on minimum mean absolute error (MMAE) is introduced and extensive simulation results are presented to compare this and the commonly used minimum mean squared error (MMSE) method. Both uniform error distribution and normal error distribution are considered. Our results indicate that MMAE clearly result in better localization accuracy when compared to MMSE.