Systems and methods for using ranging and triangulation to determine locations of wireless sensor nodes based on radio frequency communications between the nodes and various RF-enabled devices

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for determining locations of wireless nodes in a network architecture are disclosed herein. In one example, a system for localization of nodes in a wireless network architecture comprises a plurality of wireless anchor nodes each having a known location and a wireless device with one or more processing units and RF circuitry for transmitting and receiving communications in the wireless network architecture and a wireless node having a wireless device with a transmitter and a receiver to enable bi-directional communications with the plurality of wireless anchor nodes in the wireless network architecture. One or more processing units of at least one of the plurality of wireless anchor nodes are configured to execute instructions to determine a set of possible ranges between each anchor node and the wireless node having an unknown location and to perform a triangulation algorithm that utilizes a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of ranging measurements from anchor nodes.