Multihop distance estimation with Greedy approach in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions. In addition to one or more sensors, each node in a sensor network is typically equipped with a radio transceiver or other wireless communications device, a small microcontroller, and an energy source, usually a battery. A sensor network normally constitutes a wireless ad-hoc network, meaning that each sensor supports a multi-hop routing algorithm several nodes may forward data packets to the base station. Location and internodes distance estimation is of profound importance for various WSN applications. Similarly, estimation of the hop distance between two network locations is equivalent to estimating the minimum number of hops, which leads to maximization of the distance covered in multihop paths. Furthermore, hop distance estimation is closely related with transmission delay estimation and minimization of multihop energy consumption. Determination of the maximum multihop Euclidean distance corresponding to a given hop distance in a 2D network is a complex problem. The accuracy of the Gaussian pdf model depends on the number of hops and the chosen parameters, which affect the obtained error ranges. A Greedy distance maximization model is proposed, which approximates the maximum multihop Euclidean distance and evaluates the distribution of the obtained multihop distance in planar networks.