Low-overhead range-based 3D localization technique for underwater sensor networks

Underwater acoustic networks hold the promise to support a wide variety of applications; however, many desirable network services still remain unavailable to application designers. One such service is on-line node localization, which is useful both to many routing algorithms as well as to a number of sensing applications. The main contribution of this work is a range-based low-overhead localization technique, LOTUS, for underwater sensor networks. Unlike earlier range-based 3D localization techniques that required distance estimates from at least four reference nodes to localize any node, our scheme can approximate locations with two references. This enables our scheme to work in low density deployment cases and allows more nodes to be localized. Once localized, nodes exchange their locations in regular packets to further improve the estimates. We evaluate LOTUS using simulation and show that it has a good performance vs. overhead trade-off.