An interactive cluster-based MDS localization scheme for multimedia information in wireless sensor networks

A wide range of applications used in wireless sensor networks requires location information of multimedia sensor nodes. In general, the topographical location information of data acquired by a sensor is applied for smart, interactive multimedia services. However, conventional techniques employ GPS or other location-tracking devices installed on sensor nodes and thus incur additional costs, making it impractical for wireless sensor networks. In contrast, some methods provide location information by node connectivity only. One of these methods, called multidimensional scaling – MAP (MDS-MAP), provides the most accurate positioning to date. However, MDS-MAP has a computational overhead of O(n3) in a network of n nodes and, in particular, results in significant localization accuracy error in environments with holes. Thus, this paper proposes a cluster-based MDS (CMDS) for range-free localization that overcomes the shortcomings of MDS and yields smaller accuracy error in all environments. Simulations demonstrate the proposed CMDS approach provides up to 23% improvement in localization accuracy compared to the newest version of conventional MDS-MAP, hierarchical MDS (HMDS) in a sensor network environment with holes.