A distributed localization scheme for wireless sensor networks based on bounding box algorithm

Node localization is a fundamental and important technology in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). With regard to the mechanisms used for estimating location, existing localization algorithms can be divided into two categories: range-based and range-free. Compared with range-based schemes, range-free schemes do not need to measure or estimate distances or angles and are thus more suitable for WSNs. However, many of existing range-free schemes require a large amount of calculation and are thus difficult to run on sensor nodes. Enlightened by the distributed range-free localization scheme (DRLS) and its vector-based refinement algorithm, a distributed range-free localization scheme based on Bounding Box algorithm is proposed. The discrete communication model is adopted to simplify the centroid calculation of intersection of nodes' communication region. Besides, the location information of anchors within two hops is collected to improve the accuracy of the estimated locations. Analysis and simulation show that this scheme requires small amount of calculation and can satisfy cases in which sensor nodes have limited computing resources and moderate accuracy is tolerable.