Rank-One Semidefinite Programming Solutions for Mobile Source Localization in Sensor Networks

A Semidefinite Programming (SDP) relaxation is an effective computational method to solve a Sensor Network Localization problem, which attempts to determine the locations of a group of sensors given the distances between some of them. In this paper, we analyze and determine new sufficient conditions and formulations that guarantee that the SDP relaxation is exact, i.e., gives the correct solution. These conditions can be useful for designing sensor networks and managing connectivities in practice. Our main contribution is threefold: First, we present the first non-asymptotic bound on the connectivity (or radio) range requirement of randomly distributed sensors in order to ensure the network is uniquely localizable with high probability. Determining this range is a key component in the design of sensor networks, and we provide a result that leads to a correct localization of each sensor, for any number of sensors. Second, we introduce a new class of graphs that can always be correctly localized by an SDP relaxation. Specifically, we show that adding a simple objective function to the SDP relaxation model will ensure that the solution is correct when applied to a triangulation graph. Since triangulation graphs are very sparse, this is informationally efficient, requiring an almost minimal amount of distance information. Finally, we analyze a number of objective functions for the SDP relaxation to solve the localization problem for a general graph.Key wordsSensor network localizationGraph realizationSemidefinite programmingSubject Classifications90C2290C4690C9090B18

We consider the problem of estimating the discrete clustering structures under the sub-Gaussian mixture model. Our main results establish a hidden integrality property of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for this problem: while the optimal solution to the SDP is not integer-valued in general, its estimation error can be upper bounded by that of an idealized integer program. The error of the integer program, and hence that of the SDP, are further shown to decay exponentially in the signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, we show that the SDP relaxation is robust under the semirandom setting in which an adversary can modify the data generated from the mixture model. In particular, we generalize the hidden integrality property to the semirandom model and thereby show that SDP achieves the optimal error bound in this setting. These results together highlight the “global-to-local” mechanism that drives the performance of the SDP relaxation. To the best of our knowledge, our result is the first exponentially decaying error bound for convex relaxations of mixture models. A corollary of our results shows that in certain regimes, the SDP solutions are in fact integral and exact. More generally, our results establish sufficient conditions for the SDP to correctly recover the cluster memberships of [Formula: see text] fraction of the points for any [Formula: see text]. As a special case, we show that under the [Formula: see text]-dimensional stochastic ball model, SDP achieves nontrivial (sometimes exact) recovery when the center separation is as small as [Formula: see text], which improves upon previous exact recovery results that require constant separation.

In this paper, energy-based localization methods for source localization in sensor networks are examined. The focus is on least-squares-based approaches due to a good tradeoff between performance and complexity. A suite of methods are developed and compared. First, two previously proposed methods (quadratic elimination and one step) are shown to yield the same location estimate for a source. Next, it is shown that, as the errors which perturb the least-squares equations are nonidentically distributed, it is more appropriate to consider weighted least-squares methods, which are observed to yield significant performance gains over the unweighted methods. Finally, a new weighted direct least-squares formulation is presented and shown to outperform the previous methods with much less computational complexity. Unlike the quadratic elimination method, the weighted direct least-squares method is amenable to a correction technique which incorporates the dependence of unknown parameters leading to further performance gains. For a sufficiently large number of samples, simulations show that the weighted direct solution with correction (WDC) can be more accurate with significantly less computational complexity than the maximum-likelihood estimator and approaches Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). Furthermore, it is shown that WDC attains CRB for the case of a white source.

The sensor network localization (SNL) problem in embedding dimension r consists of locating the positions of wireless sensors, given only the distances between sensors that are within radio range and the positions of a subset of the sensors (called anchors). Current solution techniques relax this problem to a weighted, nearest, (positive) semidefinite programming (SDP) completion problem by using the linear mapping between Euclidean distance matrices (EDM) and semidefinite matrices. The resulting SDP is solved using primal-dual interior point solvers, yielding an expensive and inexact solution. This relaxation is highly degenerate in the sense that the feasible set is restricted to a low dimensional face of the SDP cone, implying that the Slater constraint qualification fails. Cliques in the graph of the SNL problem give rise to this degeneracy in the SDP relaxation. In this paper, we take advantage of the absence of the Slater constraint qualification and derive a technique for the SNL problem, with exact data, that explicitly solves the corresponding rank restricted SDP problem. No SDP solvers are used. For randomly generated instances, we are able to efficiently solve many huge instances of this NP-hard problem to high accuracy by finding a representation of the minimal face of the SDP cone that contains the SDP matrix representation of the EDM. The main work of our algorithm consists in repeatedly finding the intersection of subspaces that represent the faces of the SDP cone that correspond to cliques of the SNL problem.

In distributed source localization where sensors transmit measurements to a fusion node, we address the sensor selection problem where the goal is to find the best set of sensors that maximizes localization accuracy when quantization of sensor measurements is taken into account. Since sensor selection depends heavily upon rate assigned to each sensor, joint optimization of rate allocation and sensor selection is required to achieve the best solution. We show that this task could be accomplished by solving the problem of allocating rates to each sensor so as to minimize the error in estimating the position of a source. Then we solve this rate allocation problem by using the generalized BFOS algorithm. Our experiments demonstrate that the best set of sensors obtained from the proposed sensor selection algorithm leads to significant improvements in localization performance with respect to the set of sensors determined from a sensor selection process based on unquantized measurements.

Source localization in a wireless sensor network (WSN) is sensitive to the sensors' positions. In practice, due to mobility, the receivers' positions may be known inaccurately, leading to non-negligible degradation in source localization estimation performance. The goal of this paper is to develop a semidefinite programming (SDP) method using time-difference-of arrival (TDOA) and frequency-difference-of-arrival (FDOA) by taking the sensor position uncertainties into account. Specifically, we transform the commonly used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) problem into a convex optimization problem to obtain an initial estimation. To reduce the coupling between position and velocity estimator, we also propose an iterative method to obtain the velocity and position, by using weighted least squares (WLS) method and SDP method, respectively. Simulations show that the method can approach the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under both mild and high noise levels.

A SemiDefinite Programming (SDP) problem is one of the most central problems in mathematical optimization. SDP provides an effective computation framework for many research fields. Some applications, however, require solving a large-scale SDP whose size exceeds the capacity of a single processor both in terms of computation time and available memory. SDPARA (SemiDefinite Programming Algorithm paRAllel package) [Yamashita et al. 2003b] was designed to solve such large-scale SDPs. Its parallel performance is outstanding for general SDPs in most cases. However, the parallel implementation is less successful for some sparse SDPs obtained from applications such as Polynomial Optimization Problems (POPs) or Sensor Network Localization (SNL) problems, since this version of SDPARA cannot directly handle sparse Schur Complement Matrices (SCMs). In this article we improve SDPARA by focusing on the sparsity of the SCM and we propose a new parallel implementation using the formula-cost-based distribution along with a replacement of the dense Cholesky factorization. We verify numerically that these features are key to solving SDPs with sparse SCMs more quickly on parallel computing systems. The performance is further enhanced by multithreading and the new SDPARA attains considerable scalability in general. It also finds solutions for extremely large-scale SDPs arising from POPs which cannot be obtained by other solvers.

Efficient semidefinite solutions for TDOA-based source localization under unknown PS

We present semi-decentralized and distributed algorithms, designed via a preconditioned forward-backward operator splitting, for solving large-scale, decomposable semi-definite programs (SDPs). We exploit a chordal aggregate sparsity pattern assumption on the original SDP to obtain a set of mutually coupled SDPs defined on positive semidefinite (PSD) cones of reduced dimensions. We show that the proposed algorithms converge to a solution of the original SDP via iterations of reasonable computational cost, numerically comparing their performances with respect to others available in the literature.

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the steering direction of a signal, embedded in Gaussian disturbance, under a general quadratic inequality constraint, representing the uncertainty region of the steering. We resort to the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion and focus on two scenarios. The former assumes that the complex amplitude of the useful signal component fluctuates from snapshot to snapshot. The latter supposes that the useful signal keeps a constant amplitude within all the snapshots. We prove that the ML criterion leads in both cases to a fractional quadratically constrained quadratic problem (QCQP). In order to solve it, we first relax the problem into a constrained fractional semidefinite programming (SDP) problem which is shown equivalent, via the Charnes-Cooper transformation, to an SDP problem. Then, exploiting a suitable rank-one decomposition, we show that the SDP relaxation is tight and give a procedure to construct (in polynomial time) an optimal solution of the original problem from an optimal solution of the fractional SDP. We also assess the quality of the derived estimator through a comparison between its performance and the constrained Cramer Rao lower Bound (CRB). Finally, we give two applications of the proposed theoretical framework in the context of radar detection.

Efficient solvers for optimization problems are based on linear and semidefinite relaxations that use floating point arithmetic. However, due to the rounding errors, relaxation thus may overestimate, or worst, underestimate the very global optima. The purpose of this article is to introduce an efficient and safe procedure to rigorously bound the global optima of semidefinite program. This work shows how, using interval arithmetic, rigorous error bounds for the optimal value can be computed by carefully post processing the output of a semidefinite programming solver. A lower bound is computed on a semidefinite relaxation of the constraint system and the objective function. Numerical results are presented using the SDPA (SemiDefinite Programming Algorithm), solver to compute the solution of semidefinite programs. This rigorous bound is injected in a branch and bound algorithm to solve the optimisation problem.

This paper is an attempt to exploit the opportunity of Semi Definite Programming (SDP), which is an area of convex and conic optimization. Indeed, Numerous NP-hard problems can be solveby using this approach. Hence, we intend to investigate the strength of SDP to model and provide tight relaxations of combinatorial and quadratic problems in order to present a new polynomial time algorithm for solving this robust model. This algorithm was firstly use to solve the nonlinear programs, the reason for which we search to extend it to the SDP programs. Actually, this algorithm designs the combination of two penalization methods. The first one is a primal-dual interior point (PDIM) method while the second one is a primal-dual exterior point (PDEM) method. Unlike the first method, which converges globally, the second one, also called the primal dual nonlinear rescaling method, has local super linear/quadratic convergence. Therefore, it seems appropriate to use a mixed algorithm based on the interior-exterior point method (IEPM). In fact, this resolution starts from the interior method, and at a certain level of execution, it proceeds to exterior method. Hence, a convergence evaluation function is use to know the level of permutation. Through evaluation, it has been approve that our approach is use to solve some instances of max-cut problem. This problem is a central graph theory model that occurs in many real problems and it is one of many NP-hard problems, which has attracted many researchers over the years. Then, we have used a semi definite programming solver SDPA (Semi Definite Programming Algorithm) that is modify to include the exterior point method subroutine. From the computational performance, we conclude that as the problem size increases, interior-exterior point algorithm gets relatively faster. The numerical results obtained are promising.

To determine the physical location of an acoustic or wireless emitter or source localization is commonly encountered in sensor networks which are attempting to locate and track an emitter or source of the signal. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth efficient method of TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) computation when the signals of opportunity use multicarrier modulation. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed (decentralized) algorithm as a function of the Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the bandwidth between the sensors.

Recent works show that the Hilbert curve path for mobile-beacon-based localization in sensor networks has better accuracy than other approaches, such as randomized and circular paths. In this paper, the modified Hilbert curve path is introduced, and its theoretical lower bound error, compared with the basic Hilbert curve path, has been shown using Cramér–Rao lower bound analysis. It is shown that the proposed approach has a more uniform localization accuracy across all the nodes in the environment than the basic Hilbert approach. The simulation results show that this approach, combined with inter-node communication, provides better and close to uniform accuracy compared with previously proposed approaches.

We propose a novel approach to the source localization and tracking problem in wireless sensor networks. By applying minimax approximation and semidefinite relaxation, we transform the traditionally nonlinear and nonconvex problem into convex optimization problems for two different source localization models involving measured distance and received signal strength. Based on the problem transformation, we develop a fast low-complexity semidefinite programming (SDP) algorithm for two different source localization models. Our algorithm can either be used to estimate the source location or be used to initialize the original nonconvex maximum likelihood algorithm.