Range-free localization for air-dropped WSNs by filtering neighborhood estimation improvements

Abstract

Many situation management applications involve an aerial deployment of a dense sensor network over the area of interest. In this context, current range-free localization proposals, based on an iterative refinement and exchange of node estimations, are not directly applicable, due to they introduce a high traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose to control this overhead by means of avoiding the transmission of packets which do not contribute to improve the result of the localization algorithm. In particular, a node does not transmit its current position estimation if it does not significantly differ from the estimations of its neighborhood. Simulation results show that the proposed filter reduces significantly the amount of packets required by the localization process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.