COM-LOC: A distributed range-free localization algorithm in wireless networks

This paper investigates distributed range-free localization in wireless networks using a communication protocol called sum-dist which is commonly employed by localization algorithms. With this protocol, the reference nodes flood the network in order to estimate the shortest distance between the reference and blind nodes. Existing localization algorithms that use this communication protocol only evaluate the shortest distance. Our approach is somewhat different in that we optimize the localization performance for this communication protocol. We present a new algorithm called COM-LOC which exploits a certain part of the information inherent in the protocol that other algorithms consider as redundant or false information. We show that the use of this additional part of information increases the performance compared to other range-free algorithms by 68% to 206%. Other comparisons with several RSS-based localization algorithms show that COM-LOC outperforms these algorithms under a wide range of conditions, while keeping the communication costs equal.