NLOS Effect Mitigation via Spatial Geometry Exploitation in Cooperative Localization

Accurate wireless positioning of mobile agents is challenging in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation environments due to unknown range or angle biases. In this paper, we develop a cooperative localization algorithm for mixed line-of-sight (LOS)/NLOS environments where the NLOS effect is mitigated by exploiting the geometric relationship of the range biases. In particular, we cast the localization problem as a detection-aided optimization program, in which all the distance measurements are initially treated as NLOS links with unknown nonnegative biases, followed by iterative agent position estimation and LOS identification. Moreover, the maximum-likelihood estimator for the agent positions and NLOS biases is relaxed into a semidefinite program where the geometric relationship of the biases is introduced as constraints. We also characterize the cooperation gain for LOS identification, and derive the constrained Cramér-Rao bound to show the localization accuracy improvement by the geometric constraints. Finally, numerical results validate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared with other competitive methods.