GPS-free-free positioning system for wireless sensor networks

Positioning systems are important components of many communication architectures. The traditional Global Positioning System (GPS) is impractical in many situations, which makes the need for relative measurement-based approaches. Existing relative solutions lead to good results but generally require that nodes are embedded with specific capabilities. In this paper, we propose GPS-Free-Free, a simple positioning system based on distances in number of hops between nodes. GPS-free-free make very loose assumptions (only neighborhood discovery) and does not require the computation of complex algorithms. We show through simulations that GPS-free-free leads to good placement results at very low signaling overhead.