A Voronoi Approach for Scalable and Robust DV-Hop Localization System for Sensor Networks

Abstract

Localization systems have been identified as a key issue to the development and operation of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A DV-Hop localization system works by transforming the distance to all beacon nodes from hops to units of length measurement (e.g., meters, feet) using the average size of a hop as a correction factor. Despite its advantages, a DV-Hop algorithm has some disadvantages, such as its large communication cost that limits its scalability, and its mapping from hops to distance units that introduces errors that are propagated to the computation of a node location. This last issue has been solved by some recent works, but the scalability problem still is an open problem that limits this technique to small or medium sized networks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that uses Voronoi diagrams in order to scale a DV-Hop localization algorithm while mantaining or even reducing its localization error. Two types of localization can result from the proposed algorithm: the physical location of the node (e.g., latitude, longitude), or a region limited by the node's Voronoi cell. The algorithm evaluation is performed by comparison with similar algorithms. We show how the proposed algorithm can scale in different aspects such as communication and processing costs when increasing the number of nodes and beacons.