DOLLY: An experimental evaluation of distributed node positioning framework in wireless sensor networks

The capability of nodes in self-configuration becomes one of the challenges in wireless sensor networks localization scheme. We propose DOLLY (Distributed Node Localization System), a new platform of distributed localization scheme which is implemented in each node to estimate its position with the assistance of reference nodes. We evaluate the comprehensive performance of the proposed scheme in various observation areas, including distance estimation, position calculation and packet delivery. The evaluation result of the proposed scheme is compared with the measurement result obtained by Imote2. The result shows that in the three environmental conditions, i.e. outdoor LOS, indoor LOS and NLOS, the platform provides a good performance for distance estimation processing. However, the execution time of distributed localization algorithm in our proposed platform is rather high. Overall the proposed scheme has sufficient reliability in distributed processing of node positioning in wireless sensor networks.