Does multi-hop communication enhance localization accuracy?

Estimating the location of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks is a fundamental problem, as sensor node locations play a critical role in a variety of applications. In many cases the area covered is very large making it impossible to localize all sensor nodes using single-hop localization techniques. A solution to this problem is to use a multi-hop localization technique to estimate sensor node positions. Multi-hop localization techniques are classified into two main categories: range-based and range-free. Despite the numerous existing localization techniques, the fundamental behavior of multi-hop localization is yet to be fully examined. The aim of this paper is to study the effect of errors in a multi-hop localization environment and how this impacts localization accuracy. There has been a general belief that a fewer number of hops results in higher accuracy. Through different experiments on two generic localization techniques representing both categories of localization schemes, we show that such belief is not true in all cases, as in dense environments often using shorter hops gives better accuracy.