Overlapping Coalition Formation Game Based Opportunistic Cooperative Localization Scheme for Wireless Networks

Cooperative localization has emerged as a promising technique which can complement or even replace global positioning systems (GPS) in many practical scenarios, such as GPS-denied environments. In this paper, we concentrate on the distributed cooperative localization design. The conventional distributed cooperative localization approaches usually yield high computational complexity and communication overhead, due to the lack of an efficient link selection mechanism. For this purpose, we propose a novel concept named opportunistic cooperative localization, based on which each agent is able to select the most informative links rather than utilize all the possible links in a distributed, self-organized, and self-optimized manner. To achieve effective opportunistic selection, overlapping coalition formation (OCF) game is employed. In addition, we also provide an optimized terminating criterion, based on which the agents will be able to know whether and when they are well localized, and thus can terminate their localization procedure efficiently. Through simulations, we observe that by virtue of the proposed OCF game based opportunistic cooperative localization scheme along with the provided terminating criterion, the limitations of conventional distributed cooperative localization can be alleviated at the cost of negligible performance degradation.