An experimental study on the effectiveness of trilateration and probabilistic multilateration for position estimation in MANETs

In this paper we present an experimental study of trilateration and probabilistic multilateration. Both methods are techniques aimed at estimating the location of a point, based on the position of three or more references and distances to them. To asses the effectiveness of the aforementioned methods, we present a characterization of the various error conditions, a sensitivity analysis of the trilateration and probabilistic multila-teration to measure the level of collinearity among references, and a simulation-based analysis describing the results of detailed simulation experiments used to study the performance of DV-Hop that use trilateration as method to estimate the position of their nodes, as well as the version of DV-Hop that use probabilistic multilateration for the same purpose. DV-Hop is the most representative range-free positioning algorithms in the context of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our experimental results show that the probabilistic multilateration method is superior to the traditional trilateration method.