Concentric Distributed Localization Based on the Tripodal Anchor Structure and Grid Scan for Wireless Sensor Networks

Achieving high accuracy with minimum reference nodes, anchor nodes, and computation and communication costs is a goal for the localization in wireless sensor networks. Targeting at this goal, a localization scheme called concentric distributed localization with the tripodal anchor structure and grid scan (CDL-TAGS) requiring two reference nodes and a few anchor nodes is proposed in this paper. Under the precondition that the system has randomly distributed normal sensor nodes, a tripodal anchor structure is first designed. With this structure, the localization process is started from the centroid node and then stretched outward to the farthest normal nodes. Based on the two best reference nodes, a virtual point is generated to serve as the third reference node. In the CDL-TAGS scheme, a grid scan algorithm is employed to estimate the position of a normal node. Finally, we show that the communication overhead and time and space complexities among sensor nodes for CDL-TAGS can be kept at a low level. In addition, CDL-TAGS can achieve better accuracy with minimum anchor nodes as compared to some closely related localization schemes in the literature through simulation results.