Distributed localization of wireless sensor network using communication wheel

Abstract

We study the network localization problem, i.e., the problem of determining node positions of a wireless sensor network modeled as a unit disk graph. In an arbitrarily deployed network, positions of all nodes of the network may not be uniquely determined. Computational complexity results suggest that even if the network corresponds to a unique solution, a polynomial-time algorithm is unlikely to exist. So we are interested in algorithms that efficiently localize the network partially. A widely used technique that can efficiently localize a uniquely localizable portion of the network is trilateration: starting from three anchors (nodes with known positions), nodes having at least three localized neighbors are sequentially localized. However, the performance of trilateration can substantially differ for different choices of the initial three anchors. In this paper, we propose a distributed localization scheme with a theoretical characterization of nodes that are guaranteed to be localized. In particular, our proposed distributed algorithm starts localization from a strongly interior node and provided that the subgraph induced by the strongly interior nodes is connected, it localizes all nodes of the network except some boundary nodes and isolated weakly interior nodes.