Cooperative range-free localization for wireless sensor networks

Localization in wireless sensor networks support many important applications such as object tracking, resource management and multi-path routing. The hardware requirement and power consumption are very sensitive in cost-aware applications and large scale networks. This paper discusses a distributed, range-free localization scheme for the sensors without additional hardware to measure the range, time or angle of the wireless signals but only with the basic transceiver to exchange packets. Minimization of the communication link load in the network is another goal of the scheme. A Likelihood-Based location estimator is proposed here and is bounded by an uncertainty region which is helpful to localize other sensors of the network. The performance of this estimator is evaluated by mean square error and the expected uncertainty.