A Graph Drawing Approach to Sensor Network Localization

In this paper, we propose an anchor free localization mechanism for wireless sensor networks. Our algorithm is based on a graph drawing approach and uses inter-node distances to localize sensor nodes in a local coordinate system up to a global translation, rotation and reflection without any absolute reference positions such as GPS or other anchor nodes. We show that it is possible to avoid folds and flips in the localized network layout by introducing long range constraints among non adjacent nodes which can be derived from inter-node distance measurements between adjacent nodes. We evaluate the effect of different parameters like network shape, scale, average neighbors and ranging noise on our algorithm and compare it with an anchor based and a number of anchor free schemes. We also present experimental results from an actual sensor network showing the accuracy of our approach.