NBLS: Neighbor-information-based localization system for wireless sensor networks

Most applications of wireless sensor networks require that the sensor nodes be location-aware. Finding location without the aid of GPS in each node of a sensor network is important in cases where GPS is either not accessible, or not practical to use due to power, form factor or line of sight conditions. In many cases, range-based localization schemes not feasible due to hardware cost and resource restriction of the sensor nodes. As cost-efficient solutions, range-free localization schemes are quite attractive for large-scale networks. We designed a novel range-free, neighbor-information-based localization system (NBLS) which takes neighbor information into account besides hop information used in DV-Hop. It is shown that our NBLS outperforms DV-Hop and HCRL scheme significantly in terms of the average localization error when the topology of network is irregular. Even if network topology is grid, NBLS performs better than the other two schemes.