Simplify Belief Propagation and Variation Expectation Maximization for Distributed Cooperative Localization

Only a specific location can make sensor data useful. The paper presents an simplify belief propagation and variation expectation maximization (SBPVEM) algorithm to achieve node localization by cooperating with another target node while lowering communication costs in a challenging environment where the anchor is sparse. A simplified belief propagation algorithm is proposed as the overall reasoning framework by modeling the cooperative localization problem as a graph model. The high-aggregation sampling and variation expectation–maximization algorithm is applied to sample and fit the complicated distribution. Experiments show that SBPVEM can obtain accurate node localization equal to NBP and SPAWN in a challenging environment while reducing bandwidth requirements. In addition, the SBPVEM has a better expressive ability than PVSPA, for SBPVEM is efficient in challenging environments.