Improved Topology Preserving Maps for Wireless Sensor Networks Through D-VCS

Network management is crucial to implement large wireless sensor network. The network may contain hundreds to thousands of node. Furthermore, it is imperative to know the connectivity and location of the nodes to envision the framework of the network. Compared to GPS and other localization techniques, the virtual coordinate (VC) system is an affordable and efficient solution. In previous studies, the hop count from all anchor nodes was used to define the VC of a node, but the studies do not address the chance of having the same virtual coordinates. This paper introduces a distance-based virtual coordinate system (D-VCS) that uses physical distance along the shortest path from all anchor nodes to obtain distinctive virtual coordinates (VC). In the current study, we tested and analyzed the proposed D-VCS and compared it with the hop-based VCS mentioned in a previous study. We introduced a metric for connectivity error which quantitatively analyzed the precision of the introduced system. After completing the study, we observed that the TPM obtained from D-VCS shows lesser error compared to hop-based VCS. Furthermore, there was a mean deviation in connectivity error of approximately 23 % between both systems.