Joint Route Discovery and Localization in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Route discovery and node localization are two strongly correlated concepts in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and many different techniques have been proposed for both challenges. However, many of these solutions assume homogeneous network conditions, e.g., identical sensor hardware, fixed transmission powers, or uniform node deployment. In heterogeneous networks, where these parameters are allowed to differ or change over time, many of these solutions fail to ensure accurate localization and route discovery that covers the entire network. This paper introduces a new approach that combines both route discovery and sensor node localization into one protocol that considers the heterogeneous nature of many WSNs. The proposed approach does not require any extra hardware and performs both a probabilistic ad-hoc route discovery process (based on sensor transmission ranges) and energy-efficient localization of sensor nodes. The performance of this approach is evaluated in terms of localization accuracy, energy efficiency, and network coverage.