Long-Range Beacons on Sea Surface Based 3D-Localization for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), localization is an important issue and a challenging task due to harsh environments for people to access. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to locate nodes deployed in 3-D space using long-range beacons floating on the sea surface. Long-range beacons allow underwater nodes directly to obtain reference positions of beacons and to measure distances to beacons. Because all beacons are placed on the same plane, i.e. the sea surface, the proposed algorithm estimates two candidates for a node position with multidimensional scaling and then determines the final position out of two candidates. Simulation results confirm that our proposed algorithm can achieve high location accuracy with respect to measurement errors.