A Distributed Multi-coordinate Localization Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications have become a growing interest in recent years. Localization is an important issue in WSN because sensor nodes are randomly scattered over a region. They get connected into network by themselves. A reliable and low cost localization method will provide great advantage for the application of WSN in large area with sparse nodes. In this paper, a distributed multi-coordinate (DMC) localization algorithm is proposed. DMC is a range-free approach, using a small number of nodes and anchor nodes. By using the information received from each beacon in multi-coordinate systems, each node can obtain the approximated center of intersection of the multi-arc-area, and consider the approximated center as its position estimate. Simulation results show that DMC has lower estimation error, and it is an energy-efficient location method.