A New Ranging Method for Anisotropic Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor localization is used by many position dependent applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where ranging from sensor nodes to beacon nodes plays a fundamental role. Most ranging methods rely on the assumption that the deployed WSNs are isotropic, so that adjustment on measured distance is equal in all directions. However, this assumption does not stands in practice. In order to obtain more accurate distance estimation in anisotropic WSNs, we identify turning nodes in error-sensitive region, and propose a new metric of Round-route Node Correlation (RNC) to find these turning nodes. Further adjustment algorithms are proposed which captures local features of topology. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms PDM and DV-distance especially when beacon nodes are not deployed uniformly.