Alternating Combination Trilateration for Unknown Nodes of Sensor Networks

A process which determines the physical locations of nodes in a wireless sensor networks is called self-localization. Self-localization is critical for medium-to large-scale sensor networks because manual localization or pre-positioning is often impossible due to time requirements, cost constraints or inherent limitations of deployment. Most previously proposed algorithms to the problem are unable to locate sensor nodes accurately. Furthermore, the estimated location is very sensitive to the ranging error. In this paper, we present an alternating combination trilateration algorithm based on fewer beacons, the relative position of sensor nodes, weighted function and weighted polygon. Our main objective is to obtain accurate location, robustness to the ranging error, lower communication overhead, and avoid accurate synchronization, intensive computations. Numerical simulations verify its good performance when sensor nodes are deployed asymmetrically.