Tackling the flip ambiguity in wireless sensor network localization and beyond

There have been significant advances in range-based numerical methods for sensor network localizations over the past decade. However, there remain a few challenges to be resolved to satisfaction. Those issues include, for example, the flip ambiguity, high level of noises in distance measurements, and irregular topology of the concerning network. Each or a combination of them often severely degrades the otherwise good performance of existing methods. Integrating the connectivity constraints is an effective way to deal with those issues. However, there are too many of such constraints, especially in a large and sparse network. This presents a challenging computational problem to existing methods. In this paper, we propose a convex optimization model based on the Euclidean Distance Matrix (EDM). In our model, the connectivity constraints can be simply represented as lower and upper bounds on the elements of EDM, resulting in a standard 3-block quadratic conic programming, which can be efficiently solved by a recently proposed 3-block alternating direction method of multipliers. Numerical experiments show that the EDM model effectively eliminates the flip ambiguity and retains robustness in terms of being resistance to irregular wireless sensor network topology and high noise levels.