Patent ID: 7925730

Claim:
A method for localization of a sensor network comprising: communicating with a plurality of neighboring sensor nodes of a plurality of sensor nodes to determine a patch in the sensor network including determining original distances between a portion of the plurality of neighboring sensor nodes, wherein a location of each of the plurality of sensor nodes in the sensor network is unknown; localizing the patch, the localizing comprising: estimating missing distances within the patch, computing coordinates of the patch using multidimensional scaling, and refining a result of the computing using stress minimization based only on the original distances; generating a system of equations from the coordinates of the patch to merge the patch with other patches to create a layout of the sensor network, wherein the system of equations comprises: patch-induced equations comprising first coordinates of each of the plurality of sensor nodes of the patch expressed in a global layout as an affine combination of second coordinates of the neighboring sensor nodes of each of the plurality of sensor nodes, and anchor-induced equations comprising the first coordinates of a set of the plurality of sensor nodes for which the location of each of the set of the plurality of sensor nodes is unknown and is inferred, wherein the location of each of the set of the plurality of sensor nodes is inferred by determining a largest clique in the sensor network and localizing the largest clique using a multidimensional scaling technique so as to adopt the set of the plurality of sensor nodes in the clique as anchors; and solving the system of equations using a distributed equation solver to compute the layout of the sensor network including global coordinates of each of the plurality of sensor nodes in the sensor network.