Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Rigid Graphs: A Review

The applications of wireless senor networks (WSN) vary in diversified field, at different geographic locations. Location aware computing is the key for the success of such applications. Henceforth, there is a need of efficiently estimating the location of individual WSN nodes deployed in the remote geographic locations. Manually estimating the locations of these densely deployed nodes is impossible, therefore the WSN nodes must be able to localize themselves collecting local information from its neighboring nodes, which is called as the localization technique. The information used for localization is generally distance and bearing information obtained from the ranging techniques which are not accurate and are prone to error. Therefore there is a need for techniques which can cope up with this perturbed distance information. Rigid graphs have the property of sustaining various kind of deformations due to translation, rotation and reflection. Hence, it is more fruitful using the concepts of rigid graphs, for estimating accurate location coordinates from error prone distance measurements. In this paper we will scrutinize the sound theoretical background which defines the need of rigid graph based localization and different localization techniques, with associated algorithms which uses the concepts of rigid graphs.