Collaborative Position Location for Wireless Networks in Harsh Environments

Position location has become one of the more important tasks for improving communication and networking performance for future commercial wireless systems. It is also the enabling technology for many control and sensing applications envisioned by the wireless sensor networks (WSN). Despite its meaningfulness and many algorithms being developed in the past several years, position location in harsh propagation environments remains to be a challenging issue, due mainly to the lack of sufficient infrastructure support and the prominent phenomenon of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signal propagation. Recently, adopting the concept of collaborative position location has attracted much research interest due to its potential in overcoming the abovementioned two difficulties. In this work, we approach collaborative position location from two different angles. Specifically, we investigate the optimal performance of collaborative position location, which serves as a theoretical performance benchmark. In addition, we developed a computationally efficient algorithm for collaborative position location and incorporated an effective NLOS mitigation method to improve its performance in NLOS-dense environments. Overall, our work provides insight into both theoretical and practical aspects of collaborative position location.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Jia, Tao

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Buehrer, R. Michael

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Wyatt, Christopher L.
• Pasupathy, Raghu
• Pratt, Timothy J.
• Reed, Jeffrey H.

• collaborative position location
• non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-03292010-224530

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/26548