On the accuracy of centroid based multilateration procedure for location discovery in wireless sensor networks

Location discovery or localization is one of the fundamental problems in distributed wireless sensor networks that forms the basis for many location-aware applications. The main goal of localization procedures is to deduce, as accurately as possible, the location of a node from the partial information obtained from a set of nodes, which already know their location. These reference nodes are called beacons. There are several range-based and range-free localization procedures proposed in the literature. Proximity based techniques are considered as one of the effective and low cost alternatives to more expensive range-based techniques for use in resource-constrained ad hoc sensor network environments. The goal of the paper is to give an insight into the performance of the proximity based location discovery procedure used in distributed wireless sensor networks. We analyze the impact of various design choices, especially the node density and beacon density on the accuracy of the localization procedure that are based on iterative multilateration