Moving Aerial Anchors Assisted Network Localization

To provide effective wireless connectivity, the use of aerial vehicles has been proposed as a promising solution in a wide variety of applications. In some of these applications, however, to achieve desirable performance, knowing the location of users may be a necessity. One promising approach for solving the problem of obtaining user locations is through the locations of some nodes (called anchors) and measuring the distance between connected nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose prominent techniques to improve the performance of the localization using multiple moving aerial anchors (MAA). In using MAAs as anchor nodes, the anchor nodes in our scenario have movement capability. This provides us with more flexibility to enhance the accuracy of the localization with taking into consideration the power consumption of MAAs. In fact, we propose an MAA placement method by which each user can be connected to at least one MAA while MAAs communicate with as small as possible power consumption. Then, we propose a path planning for MAAs by which distances between users and MAAs can be measured in order to estimate the locations of users. Our simulation results show that our proposed localization scheme can provide highly accurate location estimations.