Management of utilization and accuracy of positioning approaches in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the most interesting research areas in networking and also in real world applications nowadays. These networks are used for gathering information, so they have a close relationship to the physical phenomena in their environment. In order to provide an accurate view of the observed sensor field, it is necessary to associate gathered information to the location of sensor nodes. Moreover, tracking certain objects for monitoring applications also necessitates location information of sensor nodes which is being incorporated into the tracking algorithms. Furthermore, geographical routing protocols, which provide scalability and localized decisions for multi-hop communication, require the locations of the nodes to be known. These requirements motivate the development of efficient localization protocols for WSNs. In this paper, we study two fundamental approaches for positioning, which are trilateration and multilateration techniques. The goal is to evaluate the effect of number of anchor nodes on the accuracy and probability of successful positioning. These parameters have not been studied by others, yet. Simulation results show that multilateration technique has better performance than trilateration technique, in our proposed scenarios.