I.: Experimental Localization with MICA2 Motes

As research on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) matures and the number of real life deployments increases, locationing (the problem of finding the physical placing of sensors without prior knowledge of their position) is attracting considerable interest. In almost any WSN application, localization knowledge within the network is a necessity, be it for identifying the source of the data and/or for aiding routing and other network services. Locationing is however, essential for the deployment of field sensing applications (i.e, the sensing of a phenomenon over an area or volume). The accuracy of localization therefore directly affects the accuracy of the information derived from the network. The paper reports on practical experimentation and evaluation of “off-the-shelf ” ranging, positioning and locationing using Mica2 motes. The results gathered and analyzed here show a large departure from the expectations from both theoretical works in locationing and the specifications for the hardware used reported by the developers. The work is of primary importance for developers of applications dependent on localization, in order to aid selection of both ranging and positioning principles of operation or/and the supporting algorithms