Distributed Range-Free Localization Algorithm Based on Self-Organizing Maps

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), determining the physical location of nodes (localization) is very important for many network services and protocols. This paper proposes a new Distributed Range-Free Localization Algorithm Based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to deal with this issue. Our proposed algorithm utilizes only connectivity information to determine the location of nodes. By utilizing the intersection areas between radio coverage of neighboring nodes, the algorithm has maximized the correlation between neighboring nodes in distributed implementation of SOM and reduced the SOM learning time. An implementation of the algorithm on Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) was done with the mobility consideration to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. From our intensive simulations, the results show that the proposed scheme achieves very good accuracy in most cases.