A novel approach towards source-to-destination distance estimation in wireless sensor networks

In WSNs (wireless sensor networks), a source node sends its packets via multi-hop relays to a destination node if the source cannot communicate with the destination directly. Estimation of the Euclidean distance between the source and its destination is an important research issue. Among many other distance estimation techniques, the one based on the hop-count information has attracted a lot of research interests. The basic idea is to seek a herustic/analytical transformation from the observed hop-count information to an unknown distance. We observe that the neighbors of a destination can have different hop-counts relative to the same source, and such information can be used to enhance the distance estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel distance estimation method, which not only uses the hop-count information of a destination, but also exploits the hop-count information of the destination´s neighbors. Simulation results show that our method outperforms other well-known hop-count-based distance estimation methods.