Rendered Path: Range-Free Localization in Anisotropic Sensor Networks With Holes

Sensor positioning is a crucial part of many location-dependent applications that utilize wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Current localization approaches can be divided into two groups: range-based and range-free. Due to the high costs and critical assumptions, the range-based schemes are often impractical for WSNs. The existing range-free schemes, on the other hand, suffer from poor accuracy and low scalability. Without the help of a large number of uniformly deployed seed nodes, those schemes fail in anisotropic WSNs with possible holes. To address this issue, we propose the rendered path (REP) protocol. To the best of our knowledge, REP is the only range-free protocol for locating sensors with constant number of seeds in anisotropic sensor networks.