Localization in internets of mobile agents: A linear approach

Fifth generation (5G) networks providing much higher bandwidth and faster data rates will allow connecting vast number of static and mobile devices, sensors, agents, users, machines, and vehicles, supporting Internet-of-Things (IoT), real-time dynamic networks of mobile things. Positioning and location awareness will become increasingly important, enabling deployment of new services and contributing to significantly improving the overall performance of the 5G system. Many of the currently talked about solutions to positioning in 5G are centralized, mostly requiring direct line-of-sight (LoS) to deployed access nodes or anchors at the same time, which in turn requires high-density deployments of anchors. But these LoS and centralized positioning solutions may become unwieldy as the number of users and devices continues to grow without limit in sight. As an alternative to the centralized solutions, this paper discusses distributed localization in a 5G enabled IoT environment where many low power devices, users, or agents are to locate themselves without global or LoS access to anchors. Even though positioning is essentially a non-linear problem (solving circle equations by trilateration or triangulation), we discuss a cooperative linear distributed iterative solution with only local measurements, communication and computation needed at each agent. Linearity is obtained by reparametrization of the agent location through barycentric coordinate representations based on local neighborhood geometry that may be computed in terms of certain Cayley-Menger determinants involving relative local inter-agent distance measurements.