Cooperative Localization Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper deals with a class of localization protocols conceived for applications to wireless sensor networks (WSN), in the presence of typical energetic and resource constraints. It has been supposed that only one mobile anchor node is always localized by resorting to global navigation satellite system (GNSS) support system. The first scheme proposed (GNSS Alone, GA) assumes that sensor nodes may interact only with this anchor node to evaluate their own positions. In addition to this, a smart cooperation strategy among sensor nodes, i.e., GNSS in ranging (GIR) scheme, has been introduced to face possible anchor node outage, due to hostile operation scenario. The proposed solutions have been in-depth characterized and evaluated within a practical scenario. The obtained results point out the protocol localization accuracy, latency and overhead, with respect to the nodes density. According to this, the most suited applications for both GA and GIR approaches are indicated.