Decentralized TDOA Sensor Pairing in Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

This letter is concerned with source localization based on time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements from spatially separated sensors in a wireless sensor network (WSN). Most of the existing works adopt a centralized sensor pairing strategy, where one sensor node is chosen as the common reference. However, due to the bandwidth and power constraints of multihop WSNs, it is well known that this kind of centralized methods is energy consuming due to the need of single and multihop transmissions of raw measurement data. In this letter, we propose a decentralized in-network sensor pairing method to acquire TDOA measurements for source localization. It is proved that the proposed decentralized in-network sensor pairing method can result in the same Cramer-Rao-Bound (CRB) as the centralized one at a far less communication cost.