Nodes Localization through Data Fusion in Sensor Network
Ren C. Luo Fellow, IEEE, Ogst Chen, *L.C. Tu.
Department of Electrical Engineering, *Department of Opto-Mechatronic,
National Chung Cheng University
160, Shang-Shing, Ming-Hsiung, Chia-Yi, Taiwan 621, R.O.C.
Email: luo@ia.ee.ccu.edu.tw, jchen@ia.ee.ccu.edu.tw, lctu@ia.ee.ccu.edu.tw
Abstract
The Location of nodes in sensor network is an
important problem with application in resource
allocation, location sensitive browsing, and emergency
communications. A key problem in sensor network
location is the creation of a method that is robust to
measurement quantization and measurement noise
and also has a reasonable implementation cost. The
RSS and TDoA are the popular distance measurement
methods, but can be easy affected by noise and not
independent. This paper explores a Covariance
Intersection (CI) that fuses together location
estimations obtained from power propagation loss
measurements and propagation time to obtain higher
accuracy location estimate. The performances of
Kalman filter type estimators are severely affected by
the ignored cross covariance. CI algorithm provides a
mechanism to fuse two or more random variables with
unknown correlation such that the computed
covariance of the new estimate is consistent; therefore
CI method is quite suitable for sensor network
application. In simulation result shows that position
estimates are correct within small ranging distance
with few initial master nodes of the system.
I. Introduction
Leveraging numerous integrated sensing devices
placed close to the actual monitoring environments, the
information that such networks can provide is more
accurate and richer than the information provided with a
system of few, expensive sensing devices. As the number
of sensor increases, it becomes more difficult to configure
and locate them. Thus, knowing the sensor location is
quite important. By helping reduce configuration
requirements and device cost, relative locations
estimation may enable applications such as environment
monitoring, intrusion detection, inventory management
and locating emergency workers in buildings. Though this
often takes the form of a location tag for sensor data,
some system use geographical information for purposes
as varied as routing and query control. An obvious
solution can involve equipping each node with Global
Positioning System (GPS) to get absolute position, but
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA’05)
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this requires significant increases in cost, size, and energy
consummation. More approaches require the highly
redundant placement of fixed references or the mass
delivery of node data to a central unit for processing, both
of which are unreasonable burdens for many sensor
networks. To control system overhead, we propose a
distributed data fusion method for propagating position
information throughout a sensor network with a limited
number of known position nodes.
Given a few reference nodes with known location
and noisy node range estimates, all nodes can derive their
positions autonomously, acting as new reference nodes in
later iteration, thus improving coverage through a scalable
hierarchy. This approach allows the reliable scheme of
new reference nodes, safely expanding position coverage
across the network.
To design a relative location system that meets the
needs of these applications, several capacities are
necessary. The system requires a network of devices
capable of peer-to-peer range management, ad-hoc
networking protocol, and a distributed location estimation
algorithm. For range measurement, the most popular
methods are Received Signal Strength (RSS), Time of
Arrival (ToA), Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Time
Difference of Arrival (TDoA). For RSS methods, the
signal power at the receiver is measured. For ToA
measurements, the propagation times from multiple nodes
to the detected nodes are measured. For TDoA methods,
the differences between the propagation times to the
nodes of two base nodes are measured. And AoA methods
measure the angle of arrival signals.
The radio signal is notorious for its impairments, thus
RSS and TDoA measurements are easy affected by noise.
And for ToA method, it requires synchronization cost.
This paper proposed a data fusion method to combine the
RSS and TDoA measurement estimates together to create
a fused estimate with higher accuracy. The robustness of
this data fusion estimator is demonstrated.
In Section II reviews the measurement methods.
Section III introduces estimation method and how CI
works. Section IV is our simulation results. Section V
summarizes our conclusions.
 localization.
II. System Architecture Distance Measurement

In our consideration, a small proportion of devices,
called master nodes, have a priori information about their
coordinates, and other nodes named general nodes that
they do not know their position in advance. All devices,
regardless of their absolute coordinate knowledge,
estimate the range between themselves and their neighbor
nodes. The true location of the general node is denoted
Į=(x,y). This paper only considers two dimensional
location but the methods can be extended easily.
The relative distance is obtained from the power
measurement of a radio signal received by a sensor. This
signal is assumed to be transmitted by the sensor whose
position has to be calculated. But those signals may
severely be affected by noise.
Received Signal Strength The relation between power of
transmitted and received signals can be derived from the
Friis transmission formula [5]:
Pr Aer Aet
Pt R 2 O2

Where
Pr received power
Pt transmitted power
Aer effective aperture of receiving antenna
Aet effective aperture of transmitting antennas
O Wavelength

R= Pt * Pr -1 * K +İR
K=Aer*Aet*O-2

This implies that the precision and accuracy of the

distance estimation depends on the precision and accuracy
Fig.1 Sensor Network Architecture. Master Node: known their position.
of the power measurement. It is important to note that
General Node: Without location knowledge of themselves.
such a condition is the worst possible because there are
both systematic and random error sources in it. İR here can
Our approach extends from a small given set of
be modeled as Gaussian Distribution.
system. The protocol assumes that most nodes do not
know their current position in advance. They may have
Time Difference of Arrival The TDoA measurement [4]
been scattered from an airplane, with occasional
is computed as follow:
movement, or planted randomly. Even GPS-based nodes
The sender transmit a signal s(t) which is delayed Wi
may hard to find out their position due to physical
to receiver i according to distance to each receiver.
obstacles or different levels of interferences. The
Correlation analysis provides a time delay Wi-Wj
geographic location of sensors is important but not able to
corresponding to the path difference to receivers i and j.
guarantee that each sensor have this information available.
ǻdi,j=v(Wi-W j)+İT, 1ЉiІjЉn
For other systems, high level abstractions or logical
İT is Gaussian probability density function
relations may be more appropriate. Nodes should be able
v is light speed.
to deliver information to others. Some form of inter-node
ranging must be possible. The ranging system can be used
to determine the position of most nodes using
“triangulation” method through RSS and TDoA
measurements. In most systems with immobile nodes,
positioning only needs to calculate once, though a system
with low mobility nodes or RF-targets could probably
revise position estimates through distributed data fusion
method.
This system can work with large numbers of nodes,
often packed in dense area. Nodes should prefer to remain
uncertain about their position rather than report inaccurate
information, especially when providing data to other
Fig.2 Detection Architecture: Master Node: with prior position
nodes. This suggests that nodes keep some estimate of
knowledge. Level 1 & 2 Node: their position estimated from master
position accuracy and reject overly uncertain data.
nodes.
Therefore data fusion method is quite important in

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 III. Estimation Methods
We use three or more master nodes through
triangulation method to determine the two dimensional
positions of general nodes. Our protocol is:
¾ First step, a node chooses its proper master nodes.
¾ Second step, the node obtains range estimates from
the selected nodes, and fuses RSS and TDoA signals.
¾ Third step, the node estimates its position by three
or more range measurements.
¾ Fourth step, the node advertises its own estimation
position for using as a reference in the next cycle.
Fig. 3 The position estimate flow.
This paper is focus on data fusion of estimates of
node locations from RSS and TDoA measurements. The
single measurement estimation method described here is
based upon the existence data for the radio propagation
environment. The data is consisted by a set of locations
with three measurement vectors for each location. The
location of the ith node is denoted as Di. The measurement
vectors of the node i are (Mi, Ri,Ti)Ζ
Mi: a vector of master node indices that indicates
which base stations made the measurements at
the ith node.
Ri: the vector of RSS measurements for the ith node.
Ti: the TDoA measurement vector for the ith node.
The measurement process for other node are
identical to location measurement (M,R,T).
We denote [x]j is the jth entry of vector x. The
unquantized measurement vectors for a node at location D
~ ~
are R R(D , M )  H R , and T G (d (D , M )  H T ) . R(Į,M)
is a function giving the deterministic received signal
strength values form the master nodes indicated in m such
that [R(Į,M)]j is the deterministic portion of the received
signal strength from the base station indicated by [M]j,
and d(Į,M) is a similar function giving the lengths of the
shortest propagation paths from the general nodes to the
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA’05)
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measuring master nodes indicated in M. İR and İT are
random variable representing measurement noise. G is
difference matrix. The simulated measurement error
values are independent between different master nodes.
Of primary consideration for the application of data
fusion of RSS and TDoA measurements is the
independence of İR and İT. If these vectors are perfectly
dependent then data fusion of RSS and TDoA would give
no improvement in accuracy as both measurements
contain identical information.
Covariance Intersection Method
We need a data fusion algorithm to combine RSS
and TDoA measurements into a new estimate. In the
distributed environment such sensor network, we cannot
keep track on “which node received estimations from
which level nodes”. Thus we do not know how much
redundant information exists in an estimate a node
receives. This means that the predicted position
covariance will underestimate the actual position error. To
avoid the potentially disastrous consequences of
redundant data on Kalman filter-type estimators,
covariance information must be maintained. However,
maintaining consistent cross covariances in distributed
networks is not possible. This in turn makes the estimated
state evolve according to the postulated state model with
little correction from the new measurements. Thus, the
state estimate drifts away from the actual state. The
Covariance Intersection (CI) [1][2][3] can be viewed as a
generalized Kalman filter. The principal advantage of CI
is that it permits filter and data fusion to be performed on
probabilistically defined estimates without knowing the
degree of correlation among those estimates. Thus CI
does not need assumptions on the dependency of the two
pieces of information, when it fuses them. If the
cross-variance of the data is unknown, it is not possible to
compute the exact covariance matrix of the estimate, but
still it is desirable to have a pair estimate-covariance that
is consistent, as defined below.
Consistency Let Z be a random variable with mean
z and ẑ be an estimate of the mean. The estimation
error is the given by ~ z zˆ  z while the covariance
associated with this error is Pzz E{~
z~
z T } . Let Pzz, be
an estimate of the covariance of ẑ , then the pair
{zˆ, Pzz } is said to be consistent if
_
Pzz t P zz
The proof can be found in [1]. In other words, the
pair estimate-covariance is consistent if the estimated
covariance matrix is an upper bound of the actual
covariance of the estimate.
Equations Let x and y be two random variables whose
means and covariance matrices are given by
 E{x}=X, E{y}=Y
Cov{x}=Pxx, Cov{y}=Pyy, Cov{xy}=Pxy
Define the estimate Z as a linear combination of x
and y: where x and y may represent either a previous
estimate of Z with certain covariance matrix or a
measurement with its own uncertainty.
The covariance intersection method is a data fusion
algorithm which takes a convex combination of the means
and covariances in the information space. This approach
is based on a geometric interpretation of the Kalman filter
process. The general form of the Kalman filter can write
as
Zˆ Wx X  W yY
T T
PZ Z Wx Pxx Wx  Wx Pxy Wx  Wy Pyx Wy  Wy Pyy Wy
Where the weights Wx and Wy are chosen to minimize
the trace of Pzz. This form reduces the conventional
Kalman filter if the estimates are independent (Pxy=0)
and.
The Covariance Intersection method provides an
estimate and a covariance matrix whose covariance
ellipsoid encloses the intersection region. The estimate is
consistent irrespective of the unknown value of P. Given
the upper bounds Pxx t Pxx and Pyy t Pyy , the covariance
intersection estimator is defined as follows:
Distributed Estimation
Nodes are responsible for estimating their own
position from locally available information. A centralized
solution often involves prohibitive overhead for
delivering input to a “position server’ and processing
collected data, as well as the difficulties of disseminating
that data back to the sensors or providing unique
mappings for a massive and unreliable sensor array. In
stead, nodes should choose their reference based on local
estimates of reliability and usefulness. Keeping
distributed computations at the sensor nodes, there their
results are needed. This also allows for rapid, ad hoc
T T
distribution and auto-configuration.
Distributed estimation involving sharing of
information among distributed estimators is one of the
applications. The general nodes can localize their position
by choosing proper master nodes from the point of energy
saving or by measuring from more master nodes to get
location more precisely. Therefore, distributed estimation
has scalability that nodes can in or out the network
without problem. But in the distributed estimation system,
the estimation errors are the one corresponding to the
previous nodes where the CI is algorithm is extremely
useful since such schemes create unknown
cross-correlations between the estimates.

Z ^ 1
Pzz wx Pxx X  wy Pyy Y
1
` Position Estimation
1 1 1
Pzz wx Pxx  wy Pyy Once a node estimates its distance to each of its
wx  wy 1 , ˃Љ̊̋ʿ̊̌Љ˄ˁ master points, it can estimate its position. Each master
node monitored by a node yields an equation as follow:
The parameter w modifies the relative weights
assigned to x and y. Different choices of w can be used to
dk ( X k  X ) 2  (Yk  Y ) 2  H k
optimize the covariance estimate with respect to different
performance criteria such as minimizing the trace or the
dk is measured distance, (Xk,Yk) is the position of master
determinant of Pzz.
node k andʳİk is the fused error term. The position can be
Let D { tr{W x PxxW x T } obtained through “triangulation,” using three or more
E { tr{W y PyyW y T } reference nodes.

Thus D 1 E 1
Pzz ( Pxx  Pyy ) 1
DE DE

and the gains are

D 1 D 1
Wx Pzz Pxx Wy Pzz Pyy
DE D E
This theorem reveals the nature of the optimality of the
best w in CI algorithm.
The main advantage of parallel estimation for each
measurement type is the independence of the data fusion
method for the location estimation calculation for each
measurement type. The estimation calculations can be
replaced with another location estimate calculation with
an associated error covariance estimate and the data Fig. 4 Distributed position estimation in sensor network. N Њ2
fusion technique can still be applied.

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IV. Simulation Results
The covariance ellipse can be represented by
{pTP-1p=k}, where k is a constant. Note that these
contours are always captured by the intersection of the
contours of the covariance Pxx, Pyy for all w, that is,
covariance intersection filter guarantees a consistent
result.
In our simulation, we deployed 100 nodes (Poisson
distribution) in a limited range distance (20m). We
simulated a single general node with at least five master
nodes, and explored single point estimation through sets
of 1,000 independent simulations. Each run generated a
given number of master nodes randomly. The effect
transmission range we assumed is 5m. The noise is
simulated using Gaussian random variant with zero mean
and a standard deviation of 3% of the range for TDoA
signal, and standard deviation 5% for RSS signal. Fig. 6 is
the cumulative density function of position error. Fig. 6
shows that the error of the position estimate increases
dramatically with the addition of master nodes, but even
with only five master nodes, over 90% of the nodes have
less than 0.22m error. During normal operation, data
fusion can reduce estimation error and avoid large errors.
The time efficiency of obtaining range estimates is
also important. The initial master nodes broadcast radio
frequency beacons let nodes obtain its ranging estimates.
This defines the fundamental length of an iteration, which
adds one level to the system. Fig. 7 shows that most
position estimates can be done in the first two iterations,
and until the sixth iteration the system coverage will be
completed. Nodes could become new reference and
broadcasts at any time. The recursive positioning can be
done during a shot period for the most immobile sensor
networks.

Fig. 5 The Shape of the updated covariance ellipse. The variances Pxx and Pyy are the
outer solid ellipse. The dashed ellipses are different values of w.

Fig. 6 Cumulative distribution of single node position estimation error

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 ʸ ˟˸̉˸˿ʳ˅
ˇ˃
ˆˈ
˟˸̉˸˿ʳ˄
ˆ˃
˅ˈ
˅˃
˄ˈ
˟˸̉˸˿ʳˆ
˄˃
˟˸̉˸˿ʳ˃
˟˸̉˸˿ʳˇ
ˈ ˟˸̉˸˿ʳˈ ˟˸̉˸˿ʳˉ
Fig. 6 Node level distribution
V. Conclusions
This paper explores a method of data fusion for
RSS and TDoA measurement in sensor network localizing.
In distributed estimation, the correlation among different
estimates is difficult to compute and usually ignored.
Current practice is to ignore the unknown
cross-correlations. However, this approach leads to
under-estimating the covariance matrix and even causes
the divergence of the algorithms in the case of distributed
estimation. CI algorithm can improve the accuracy of
location measurement and robust to different levels of
measurement noise, and lower the computational cost. We
use CI fused variance into measurement error. The
position of nodes can be estimated through simple
recursion.
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