  It has been shown that cooperative localization is capable of improving both
the positioning accuracy and coverage in scenarios where the global positioning
system (GPS) has a poor performance. However, due to its potentially excessive
computational complexity, at the time of writing the application of cooperative
localization remains limited in practice. In this paper, we address the
efficient cooperative positioning problem in wireless sensor networks. A
space-time hierarchical-graph based scheme exhibiting fast convergence is
proposed for localizing the agent nodes. In contrast to conventional methods,
agent nodes are divided into different layers with the aid of the space-time
hierarchical-model and their positions are estimated gradually. In particular,
an information propagation rule is conceived upon considering the quality of
positional information. According to the rule, the information always
propagates from the upper layers to a certain lower layer and the message
passing process is further optimized at each layer. Hence, the potential error
propagation can be mitigated. Additionally, both position estimation and
position broadcasting are carried out by the sensor nodes. Furthermore, a
sensor activation mechanism is conceived, which is capable of significantly
reducing both the energy consumption and the network traffic overhead incurred
by the localization process. The analytical and numerical results provided
demonstrate the superiority of our space-time hierarchical-graph based
cooperative localization scheme over the benchmarking schemes considered.
