Localization in time and space for wireless sensor networks: An efficient and lightweight algorithm

In many applications that use Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), detected events need to be localized in both time and space. As a result, sensor nodes need to have precisely synchronized clocks as well as to be localized in a common spatial reference system. While synchronization and localization algorithms have been proposed to solve these problems independently, in this work we propose to combine both synchronization and localization into a single problem that we refer to as the time–space localization problem. We then propose a novel and efficient time–space localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks which we refer to as the Lightness algorithm. Our proposed algorithm not only takes advantage of the additional hardware resources required by the positioning mechanism in order to improve the performance and scalability of synchronization, but also benefits from the additional communication needed by the synchronization mechanism in order to decrease positioning errors. We also present an extensive set of experiments to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Our results indicate clearly that our proposed scheme is scalable while keeping a low synchronization error and a low communication overhead. Our results also indicate that the additional packets needed to compute clocks’ drift have the ability to decrease the positioning errors to almost one third of the initial positioning.