Recovery of Localization Errors in Sensor Networks using Inter-Agent Measurements

Abstract: A practical challenge which arises in the operation of sensor networks is the presence of sensor faults, biases, or adversarial attacks, which can lead to significant errors incurring in the localization of the agents, thereby undermining the security and performance of the network. We consider the problem of identifying and correcting the localization errors using inter-agent measurements, such as the distances or bearings from one agent to another, which can serve as a redundant source of information about the sensor network's configuration. The problem is solved by searching for a block sparse solution to an underdetermined system of equations, where the sparsity is introduced via the fact that the number of localization errors is typically much lesser than the total number of agents. Unlike the existing works, our proposed method does not require the knowledge of the identities of the anchors, i.e., the agents that do not have localization errors. We characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions on the sensor network configuration under which a given number of localization errors can be uniquely identified and corrected using the proposed method. The applicability of our results is demonstrated numerically by processing inter-agent distance measurements using a sequential convex programming (SCP) algorithm to identify the localization errors in a sensor network.