Improved solution for node location
multilateration algorithms in wireless
sensor networks
✉
C. Müller , D.I. Alves, B.F. Uchôa-Filho, R. Machado,
L.L. de Oliveira and J.B.S. Martins
A modification of the gradient descent method that can be used in mul-
tilateration algorithms for node location in wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) is proposed. Through computer simulations, the proposed sol-
ution compares favourably in terms of computational complexity and
convergence performance with respect to a multilateration method
based on the Gauss–Newton algorithm is shown, which is commonly
used for this purpose. The contribution can be useful for multilateration
tasks in real applications based on WSN that have hardware and/or
power constraints.
Introduction: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have made a great pro-
gress in the last decade and are increasingly present in meaningful appli-
cations such as security, monitoring, medical, industrial, military, and
many others that due to recent technological developments have
become much more visible [1, 2]. In several of these applications,
knowing the position of the nodes is very important. However, the net-
works considered in this kind of applications are usually composed of
sensor nodes that have extremely limited resources, such as low proces-
sing and data storage capacities, relatively low transmission rate, and
reduced power supply, which should be taken into account in a
project requirement analysis [1]. Therefore, in networks with hundreds
or even thousands of nodes, it is impossible to have a global positioning
module in all of the units. This is an impracticable solution for node
localisation [2].
Current localisation algorithms used to estimate the unknown node
positions commonly have to perform a multilateration. As a minimum
requirement, a network must have at least three reference nodes,
named anchor nodes, in order to estimate a position in a two-
dimensional space. The multilateration requires the knowledge of the
distances between the anchors and the unknown nodes. These distances
can be estimated by following methods such as the ones based on the
received signal strength indicator (RSSI) [3] and the ones based on
the propagation time of a radio frequency signal [4]. Due to the inaccur-
acy inherent to the distance measurements, the multilateration processes
generally require the execution of a non-linear optimisation to obtain the
best solution. In this Letter, we propose a modification of the gradient
descent method (GDM) for node location in WSNs to achieve a low
complexity (in terms of computational load) and an improved conver-
gence performance.
Problem statement: A multilateration, illustrated in Fig. 1, aims to
provide an estimative (û = [ x̂ ŷ ]) of the unknown node location. To
this end, the unknown node needs information on the position
(ai = [ xi yi ]) of n reference nodes and the measured (estimated) dis-
tances (d̂i ) between these n anchors and the true location
(u∗ = [ x∗ y∗ ]) of the unknown node. Since these distance measure-
ments are inaccurate, we can only obtain an estimated location of the
unknown node by considering a cost function. In this way, according
to [4], this multilateration can be calculated in the weighted least-squares
sense by
 


n
û = arg min w2i fi2 (u)
u=[ x y ] i=1
where

 2
fi (u) = (x − xi )2 + y − yi − d̂i
and wi are reliability weights associated with the measured distances.
Such multilateration/optimisation problem is commonly solved by the
Gauss–Newton algorithm (GNA) [2]. In effect, the GNA is a modifi-
cation of the Newton’s method [5] particularised to the problem of mini-
mising a sum of squared functions. It can achieve quadratic convergence
without requiring the complex second derivative of Newton’s method.
ELECTRONICS LETTERS 23rd June 2016 Vol. 52 No. 13 pp. 1179–1181
The GNA is a local and iterative optimisation method that can be pre-
sented as [2, 5]
u(k+1) = u(k) + DT (k) (3)
with increment given as
 −1
D(k) = − JT (k) WJ (k) JT (k) Wf (k) (4)
T
where f W [f1 (u ) · · · fn (u )] with fi (u ) as defined in (2), J is
(k) (k) (k) (k) (k)
the Jacobian matrix of f (k) with respect to u(k) , and W W wIn with
w W [w1 · · · wn ]T and In is the n-dimensional identity matrix. It
should be mentioned that (4) was also obtained in [6], but following
another procedure.
a2
a1
dˆ2
dˆ1
u*
û
a3
a4
dˆ3
dˆ4
Fig. 1 Multilateration scenario with four anchor nodes
Proposed multilateration algorithm: We are interested in finding a sol-
ution as simple as possible to solve the multilateration described before.
To this end, in this Letter, we propose a multilateration algorithm based
on the GDM, which is known by its simplicity [5]. Unfortunately, the
GDM suffers from low speed of convergence. Therefore, we propose
a modification of the GDM to increase the speed of convergence,
making it more suitable for this application.
As an iterative method, the GDM can also be presented as (3) but, in
contrast with the GNA, the increment follows the negative gradient
direction of (1), which is given by
D(k) = −aJT (k) Wf (k) (5)
where α is the step size, a real number that must be small enough to
ensure that the value of the cost function will decrease after each iter-
ation, and the other variables in (5) are defined in the same way as in
(4). From (4) and (5), one can verify that the computational load per iter-
ation of the GNA is roughly twice that of the GDM.
The step size α in (5) can be optimised at each iteration. There are
several methods to do that and they are usually highly complex [5].
Generally speaking, it is more cost effective to use a less optimised α
and concentrate efforts on recalculating the gradient direction.
Basically, we propose
h
a= n (6)
i=1 wi
where η is a constant gain to be optimised. On the other hand, the
denominator of (6) is dependent on the WSN configuration, and has
the role of providing a compensation for the constancy of the numerator.
(1)
Simulations and discussions: We evaluate by Monte Carlo simulations
the performance of the proposed multilateration algorithm and the GNA.
For the simulations, we have considered a WSN scenario with a square
region of side length 100 m, as shown in Fig. 2. The square area was
filled with 100 randomly distributed anchor nodes (shown as large red
(2)
squares) and with a two-dimensional regular grid of unknown nodes
(shown as black dots) uniformly spaced by 2 m from each other. The
simulation results presented along this section were averaged over 100
multilateration calculations performed by all of the unknown nodes.
The following considerations were taken into account in our simu-
lations for both the GNA and the proposed algorithm. The number of
anchor nodes seen by each unknown node is a parameter (n) that can
be chosen. The particular anchor nodes participating in the location of
an unknown node are exactly those associated with the n lowest esti-
mated distances (d̂i ). These distances were estimated through the
RSSI, thus d̂i typically assumes a Gaussian distribution [2]:
d̂i = N (di , (rdi )2 ), where di is the exact distance between the
unknown node and the ith anchor, and rdi is the standard deviation of
d̂i with range error factor r. Under these considerations, the weight
vector is formed by the inverse of the standard deviation (wi = 1/(rdi))
[6]. The stop criterion for the iterative process is: D(k) 2 , 0.01 m
[2] or a maximum number of iterations equal to 50. Finally, for simpli-
city, the initial guess for the unknown node location is chosen as the
geometrical centre of the three closest anchor nodes (according to the
estimated distances).
for n = 3 and 10. As can be seen in the figure, unlike the GNA, the pro-
posed algorithm is quite robust to variations of the range error factor.
Moreover, for moderate-to-high range error factor, the proposed algor-
ithm has a much better convergence performance.
Finally, Fig. 5 compares the ANI of the proposed and the GNA as a
function of the range error factor, for n = 3 and 10. We can see that the
GNA requires fewer iterations for low-to-moderate values of the range
error factor. However, since the computational load per iteration of
the GNA is roughly twice as large as the one of the proposed algorithm,
we can conclude that the proposed algorithm has lower computational
complexity for range error factor greater than 0.13.
16

average number of iterations

14
100
12
10
80
8
proposed, n = 3
6 GNA, n = 3
proposed, n = 10
60 4 GNA, n = 10
y-axis, m

0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20 0.25 0.30

r
40

Fig. 5 Average number of iterations required for convergence against range

20
error factor

Conclusion: We have proposed a modification of the gradient descent

0 method in order to obtain a low complexity and an accurate multilatera-
0 20
Fig. 2 Simulated scenario
Furthermore, in all simulations, we declared a convergence error
whenever the final estimated location deviated from the optimal location
by more than 1 m. The optimal position was taken as the one produced
with the minimisation in (1), which can be obtained with the Matlab
function fminsearch. We should mention that, in the simulation results
of Figs. 3 and 5, the cases in which a convergence error occurred
have been discarded.
26
average number of iterations
40 60 80 100 tion algorithm for node localisation in wireless sensor networks.
x-axis, m Through computer simulations, the proposed algorithm has been com-
pared to the well-known Gauss–Newton algorithm in terms of compu-
tational complexity and convergence performance. The simulations
revealed that the proposed algorithm has better convergence properties
and lower computational load in the presence of significant range
error, which is the case when the RSSI are used to estimate the distances
between nodes. Therefore, we believe that the proposed multilateration
algorithm can be useful in node location applications, contributing to
reduce power consumption while still maintaining a good location
precision.
Acknowledgment: The authors thank the Brazilian agencies CAPES and
CNPq for the financial support.

n = 3, r = 0.05
24
n = 3, r = 0.3
22 n = 3, for all r
20
n = 10, r = 0.05 © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2016
n = 10, r = 0.3
18 n = 10, for all r Submitted: 11 March 2016 E-first: 16 May 2016
16 doi: 10.1049/el.2016.0688
14 One or more of the Figures in this Letter are available in colour online.
12 C. Müller and D.I. Alves (Federal University of PAMPA – UNIPAMPA,
10
Alegrete, RS, 97546-550, Brazil)
8
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.0 ✉ E-mail: cristian.muller@unipampa.edu.br
h
B.F. Uchôa-Filho (Federal University of Santa Catarina – UFSC,
Fig. 3 Average number of iterations required for convergence against η Florianópolis, SC, 88040-900, Brazil)
R. Machado, L.L. de Oliveira and J.B.S. Martins (Federal University of
0.6 Santa Maria – UFSM, Santa Maria, RS, 97105-900, Brazil)
convergence error rate

proposed, n = 3
0.5 GNA, n = 3
0.4 proposed, n = 10 References
GNA, n = 10
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0 2 Guo, H., Low, K.-S., and Nguyen, H.A.: ‘Optimizing the localization of a
0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20 0.25 0.30 wireless sensor network in real time based on a low-cost microcontrol-
r
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Fig. 4 Convergence error rate against range error factor user location and tracking system’. Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, Tel Aviv,
Israel, March 2000, vol. 2, pp. 775–784
The first simulation result, in Fig. 3, considers the average number of 4 Turin, G.L., Jewell, W.S., and Johnston, T.L.: ‘Simulation of urban
iterations (ANI) required for convergence for the proposed method as a vehicle-monitoring systems’, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., 1972, 21, (1),
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0.3, in steps of 0.05 [2]. Only the extreme cases of r = 0.05 and r = 0.3 5 Bertsekas, D.P.: ‘Nonlinear programming’ (Athena Scientific, Belmont,
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ELECTRONICS LETTERS 23rd June 2016 Vol. 52 No. 13 pp. 1179–1181