Multilateration and Flip Ambiguity Mitigation in Ad-hoc Networks

Many approaches to localization in ad-hoc networks are based on the distance estimation between nodes. Due to signal propagation characteristics and measurement errors, the distance estimations are not accurate. Subsequently, the entire localization process produces node positions with a certain error. Our work is focused on the mitigation of distance estimation errors caused by a phenomenon called flip ambiguity. Unlike other works in the field focusing on the trilateration, we focus on the multilateration approach as well. We propose an enhanced multilateration algorithm mitigating the flip ambiguity and show its benefits (higher accuracy) by comparing it with both the traditional multilateration and trilateration algorithms in a simulated scenario.