Performance analysis of localization methods for wireless sensor networks

Accurate and cost-effective localization is an important requirement for several sensor network applications. In this paper, we compare two localization methods-multilateration and Isomap and study some of the key issues that affect their performance. We also analyze the flip ambiguity problem and the effect of applying a robustness criterion in both the methods. Our simulation results show that the performance of multilateration is highly dependent on anchor density and the level of noise present in distance measurements. It requires high anchor density and low noise to give accurate position estimates. Whereas, Isomap is more robust to noisy distance measurements and performs much better than multilateration even with less number of anchors.