Connectivity and RSSI Based Localization Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

A multitude of applications of wireless sensor networks require that the sensor nodes be location-aware. Range-based localization schemes are sometimes not feasible due to hardware cost and resource restriction of the sensor nodes. As cost-efficient solutions, range-free localization schemes are more attractive for large-scale networks. This paper presents Weighted Centriod (W-Centriod), a novel range-free localization scheme extended on the basis of Centroid scheme, which takes received signal strength indicator (RSSI) metric into account besides connectivity metric used in Centroid scheme. It’s shown that our W-Centriod method outperforms Centriod scheme significantly in terms of both the average localization error and the uniformity of error distribution across different positions, which decrease by 49.3% and by 37.7%, respectively, under the best circumstance. Moreover, a two-phase localization approach consisting of a field data collection phase and an off-line parameter optimization phase is proposed for localization in wireless sensor networks.