A Survey on Distributed Network Localization from a Graph Laplacian Perspective

Network localization serves as a fundamental component for enabling various position based operations in multi-agent systems, facilitating tasks like target searching and formation control by providing accurate position information for all nodes in the network. Network localization focuses on the challenge of determining the positions of nodes within a network, relying on the known positions of anchor nodes and internode relative measurements. Over the past few decades, distributed network localization has garnered significant attention from researchers. This paper aims to provide a review of main results and advancements in the field of distributed network localization, with a particular focus on the perspective of graph Laplacian. Owning to its favorable characteristics, graph Laplacian unifies various network localization, even when dealing with diverse types of internode relative measurements, into a unified protocol framework, which can be constructed by a linear method and ensure the global convergence.