Cooperative improved target localization in harsh environments using direction of arrival

Target localization is an important issue for many applications in wireless sensor networks. However, it is rather difficult to maintain the localization accuracy in mixed line-of-sight (LOS) and non-lineof-sight (NLOS) environments as NLOS propagation leads to larger error than what LOS does. In this paper, we propose a new target localization method in mixed environments where NLOS is dominant and only one base node might be in LOS toward target. We use the cooperation between receiver nodes and the direction of arrival (DOA) of received signals to estimate the target’s location. The proposed cooperative target localization method tries to identify a base node that has LOS with respect to target node and use the LOS information for precise positioning of target node. We simulate the proposed method to analyze its performance. Simulation results confirm that our proposed method improves the localization accuracy on average by 20 percent in comparison with traditional cooperative methods.