GDL: A Geographic Distributed Localization Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract — Localization is a fundamental problem in sensor networks. This paper proposes a new distributed localization algorithm called GDL (“Geographic Distributed Localization”) that is based on hop-counting. Although the idea of predicting node position from connectivity information in WSNs is not new, our algorithm improves on other localization algorithms of this type in several key ways. Results from extensive simulation in NS-2 show a significant improvement in the accuracy with which locations can be determined in WSNs with varying density and different number of nodes on irregular placements. In particular, when compared with the MDS-MAP series of algorithms, our algorithm achieves about a 30–40 % improvement in accuracy. It also has a lower communication cost (O(n) versus O(nlogn)) than MDS-MAP(P), and has a low constant memory cost per node. Keywords-component; Position estimation, localization, sensor networks, hop counting, multidimensional scaling