A distributed and simplified localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Localization is a problem of estimating the spatial coordinates of nodes in a wireless ad-hoc sensor network. Aiming at the low power, low cost and low configuration requirements of sensor networks, we present a localization algorithm with few nodes having known physical positions assisting unknown nodes in obtaining their positions based on distributed and simplified processing in this paper. The unknown nodes are located by all the partitioned groups that each group includes three reference nodes and can obtain the final estimate results by distributed processing and decision. Numerical simulation results show that the method decreases the complexity of the processing, and even with a considerable ranging inaccuracy, has good performance and robustness by adjusting decision threshold.