A Fine-grained Hop-count Based Localization Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, many localization algorithms have been proposed for wireless sensor networks, in which the hop-count based localization schemes are attractive due to the advantage of low cost. However, these approaches usually utilize discrete integers to calculate the hop-counts between nodes. Such coarse-grained hop-counts make no distinction among one-hop nodes. More seriously, as the hop-counts between nodes increase, the cumulative deviation of hop-counts would become unacceptable. In order to solve this problem, we propose the concept of fine-grained hop-count. It is a kind of float-type hop-count, which refines the coarse-grained one close to the actual distance between nodes. Based on this idea, we propose a fine-grained hop-count based localization algorithm (AFLA). In AFLA, we first refine the hop-count information to obtain finegrained hop-counts, then use the Apollonius circle method to achieve initial position estimations, and finally further improve the localization precision through confidence spring model (CSM). We conduct the comprehensive simulations to demonstrate that AFLA can achieve 30% higher average accuracy than the existing hop-count based algorithm in most scenarios and converge much faster than the traditional mass-spring model based scheme. Furthermore, AFLA is robust to achieve an approximate 35% accuracy even in noisy environment with a DOI of 0.4. Besides, we also construct a Testbed that consists of 17 MICAz motes to verify the performance of AFLA in real environment.