Non-Line-of-Sight Beacon Identification for Sensor Localization

In recent years, sensors are often deployed to sense the target environment. Besides the sensed environmental information, sensor's position information itself is very important in most cases. With the increasing number of sensors, automatic sensor localization becomes necessary. For accurately localizing sensors, line of sight between nodes and beacons is often required. However, in many cases, it is very difficult to ensure that every beacon has the line of sight to a target sensor node. In this paper, a non-line-of-sight beacon identification approach is proposed. With which, the beacons that have no line of sight to a target sensor can be found out and then ruled out, thus the final localization result can be rectified and the accuracy can be improved. Simulations are conducted, and results show that non-line-of-sight beacons can be identified effectively. The proposed approach will be helpful in the real sensor localization in sensor networks, especially for the systems that beacons are sparsely deployed.