A nonsmooth optimization approach to sensor network localization

In this paper the problem of localization of wireless sensor network is formulated as an unconstrained nonsmooth optimization problem. We minimize a distance objective function which incorporates unknown sensor nodes and nodes with known positions (anchors) in contrast to popular semidefinite programming (SDP) methods which use artificial objective functions. We study the main properties of the objective function in this problem and design an algorithm for its minimization. Our algorithm is a derivative-free discrete gradient method that allows one to find a near global solution. The algorithm can handle a large number of sensors in the network. This paper contains the theory of our proposed formulation and algorithm while experimental results are included in later work.