On Distinguishing Relative Locations with Busy Tones for Wireless Sensor Networks

Bounding-box mechanism is a well known low-cost localization approach for wireless sensor networks. However, the bounding-box location information can not distinguish the relative locations of neighboring sensors, hence leading to a poor performance for some applications such as location-aware routing. This paper proposes a Distinguishing Relative Locations (DRL) mechanism which uses a mobile anchor to broadcast tones and beacons aiming at distinguishing the relative locations of any two neighboring nodes. Experimental study reveals that the proposed DRL mechanism effectively distinguishes relative locations of any two neighboring nodes and hence significantly improves the performance of location-aware routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs).