Joint relative position and velocity estimation for an anchorless network of mobile nodes

Abstract

Localization is a fundamental challenge for any wireless network of nodes, in particular when the nodes are mobile. We present an extension of the classical Multidimensional scaling (MDS) for an anchorless network of mobile nodes, wherein the solutions to the time-varying relative node positions are shown to lie in the derivatives of the time-varying inter-nodal pairwise distances. Moreover, we show that the relative position of a mobile node at each time instance is only dependent on the initial relative position, relative velocity and a common rotation matrix of the respective node, which are estimated using MDS-like and least squares estimators. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions and the results are presented.