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Localization for mobile group users is one of the important applications in cyber-physical systems. However, due to the sparse deployment of anchors and the instability of signals in the wireless environment, users cannot receive information from adequate anchors, which leads to the localization quality being undependable and unacceptable. To solve this problem, we propose exploiting the localized users as the mobile anchors for localizing the nonlocalized users. These mobile users cooperate as a whole group to improve the localization accuracy. Moreover, to decrease the communication cost among users, an algorithm for electing mobile anchors is designed, with several provable properties. This electing algorithm is a distributed method, without advanced negotiations among mobile users. In addition, for the scenarios with a crowd of users, we divide the users into different groups according to their distance information, which can ensure that only the dependable anchors are used for the localization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the localization dependability can be improved obviously. In terms of localization probability, our method outperforms the traditional fixed anchors-based method by approximately 70% with a small increment of communication cost (about 30%), and outperforms the method in which all the localized users are exploited as mobile anchors by about 50% with about a 70% decrement of communication cost.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.