Distributed qualitative localization for wireless sensor networks

The use of localization mechanism is essential in wireless sensor networks either for communication protocols (geographic routing protocol) or for application (vehicle tracking). The goal of localization mechanism is to determine either precisely or coarsely the node location using either a global reference (GPS) or a locale one. In this work, we introduce a new localized algorithm which classified the proximity of the neighborhood for a node. This qualitative localization does not use any anchor or dedicated hardware like a GPS. Each node builds a Qualitative Distance Table according to the 2-hop neighborhood informations. Thus, the algorithm allows to determine coarsely the location of the neighbors which are classified as very close, close or far. The algorithm is analyzed on a regular particular topology and then we evaluate this accuracy on a random topologies. We apply this algorithm for a localized topology control and we show that these topology control algorithms remain effective even without GPS information.