Spatial Ordering Derivation for One-Dimensional Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensors can be deployed along a road or bridge to form a one-dimensional wireless sensor network where nodes have a spatial ordering. This spatial characteristic indicates relative locations for nodes and facilitates functions like object tracking and monitoring in the network. We target at deriving this ordering without attaching extra hardware to sensor nodes. In this work, we propose to exploit RSSI (received signal strength indicator) to generate the spatial ordering. The approach is based on our observation: the largest RSSI value indicates the shortest distance. Evaluations on two datasets show that our algorithm generates the spatial ordering at high success rate.