Accurate Range-Free Localization in Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

To localize the wireless sensor networks nodes, only the hop-based information (i.e., hops' number, average hop size, and so on) has been, so far, exploited by range-free techniques, with poor-accuracy, however. In this paper, we show that localization accuracy may greatly benefit from joint exploitation, at no cost, of the information already provided by the forwarding nodes (i.e., relays) between each anchor (i.e., position aware) and sensor nodes pair. As such, we develop a novel range-free localization algorithm, derive its average location estimation error (LEE) in closed-form, and compare it in LEE performance with the best representative algorithms in the literature. We show that the proposed algorithm outperforms them in accuracy. In contrast to the latter, we further prove that it is able to achieve an LEE average and variance of about 0 when the number of sensors is large enough, thereby achieving an unprecedented accuracy performance among range-free techniques.