Location algorithm for wireless sensor networks in industrial applications

Wireless sensor networks is an emerging technology, which has aroused a great interest in the research community in the last years. The applicability of this technology to industrial environments, which are usually noisy and disturbing, requires that new algorithms are developed, which are robust enough to overcome the difficulties that appear in these applications. The most basic sensing activity a wireless sensor network can perform is the location of its nodes. This basic information can make other tasks, such as routing, calibration, etc. easier to tackle with, which makes it a good sensing example for these robust algorithms. In this paper we describe a distance based location algorithm, which degrades gracefully as the error made in the estimation of distances grows. This is the first step to get a group of robust algorithms, which take advantage of the cooperation among sensors to provide more reliable information.