Experimental evaluations of RSS threshold-based optimised DV-HOP localisation for wireless ad-hoc networks

DV-HOP is a well-known connectivity-based range-free scheme which offers a cost-effective localisation solution for resource-constrained wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks. However, it generates a prominent amount of error with small-scale networks due to its multi-hop nature. To minimise the error and to make it applicable to both small- and large-scale networks, it is proposed to configure the connectivity of the network using available received signal strength (RSS) measurements and a predefined RSS threshold. An approximate formula for the optimal RSS threshold value that shows the minimum amount of error for a particular network to be localised is derived as a function of the total number of nodes and the network size. Experimental results confirm that utilising the proposed RSS threshold-based connectivity configuration significantly improves the localisation accuracy of DV-HOP in a practical environment without any extra hardware.