Localization in large scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks facilitate monitoring physical environments with improved accuracy. Localization has been a major challenge in such networks because without finding the position of the sensor that is reporting sensed data, the reported data will not be useful. In this paper, we survey some of the existing localization techniques and propose a new algorithm for large scale networks that minimizes both localization error and power consumption. We also evaluate the performance of these algorithms using the network simulator (NS-2) measuring several metrics such as energy and localization error while varying a number of simulation parameters such as the number of sensors, the area size, etc. Results show that significant enhancement is obtained with the proposed algorithm.