Dynamic Multidimensional Scaling with anchors and height constraints for indoor localization of mobile nodes

In distance-based localization, estimating the position of a network of wireless sensors is not an easy task. The problem increases when dealing with moving nodes and cluttered indoor environments. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature and, among them, the Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) technique gained a lot of interest due to its resilience to flips ambiguities and easiness of use. Many variants of MDS have been proposed to overcome issues such as partial connectivity or distributed computation. In this context, it is common to place some anchors nodes to help in estimating the coordinates of the network correctly. However, instead of using the anchor’s positions directly during the minimization of the MDS cost function, most approaches act on the estimated coordinates at the end of the MDS computation without fully utilizing the knowledge about anchors. In this work, the classic MDS and Dynamic MDS have been reformulated to utilize the anchor’s position inside the minimization function. A set of real experiments in 3D with Ultrawide-band devices show that our approach considerably improves the accuracy of localization with respect to the usual MDS techniques.