An innovative beacon-assisted bi-mode positioning method in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), location information is important to ensure both performance and efficiency of WSN. This paper presents a new positioning method in WSN with reasonable implementation cost and excellent performance. Given a few beacon nodes with known locations and node range estimates based on beacon signals, all nodes' location information can be derived in a passive active mode by solving a set of circle equations through data propagation. Time synchronization is not necessary for all sensor nodes. The dilution of precision for beacon nodes is also discussed. This technique is cost-efficient, scalable and easy to implement. The simulation results show that the proposed method is fast convergent and precise.