Low-cost two-hop anchor node-based distributed range-free localization in wireless sensor networks

Due to the fact that most of the sensor network applications are based on the location information of sensor nodes, localization is an essential research area. Some localization schemes in the literature require sensor nodes to have additional devices to measure the distance or angle between two sensor nodes, but it is not suitable for low-cost sensor nodes. On the other hand, other localization schemes use only the connectivity information of sensor nodes so that localization is not much accurate enough. In this paper, we propose a range-free localization scheme, called Low-cost Two-hop Anchor Node-based Distributed Range-free Localization (LADL), which offers a higher accuracy with lower cost than the previous works. LADL exploits a small portion of anchor nodes which know their own location beforehand. In LADL, sensor nodes collect the location information of the anchor nodes within two-hop distance and calculate their own location using a grid-scan algorithm. The simulation results show that LADL has a maximum of 12% lower delivery cost of location information messages and 25% higher accuracy than DRLS [8].