Adaptive node placement for improving localization accuracy in clutter-prone environments

Range-based localization techniques can yield unacceptably large errors when used in cluttered environments. Clutter in the environment leads to large distance measurement errors due to non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signal propagation. In this paper, we focus on the localization of a mobile node in clutter using a multi-hop localization method, namely DV-Distance, and suggest that node mobility is key to improving localization accuracy in cluttered environments. We propose APDV, a distributed control algorithm that carefully moves nodes in the monitored area to reduce distance overestimates caused by clutter and network sparsity. We evaluate the performance of APDV in simulated and real network settings. Our technique is shown to outperform existing approaches when a majority of the distance measurements are NLOS in nature.