A novel range-free localization based on regulated neighborhood distance for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Range-free localization methods are suitable for large scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks due to their less-demanding hardware requirements. Many existing connectivity- or hop-count-based range-free localization methods suffer from the hop-distance ambiguity problem where a node has a same distance estimation to all of its one-hop neighbors. In this paper, we define a new measure, called regulated neighborhood distance (RND), to address this problem by relating the proximity of two neighbors to their neighbor partitions. Furthermore, we propose a new RND-based range-free localization method, and compare our localization algorithm with peer classical algorithms in different network scenarios, which include grid deployment, random uniform deployment, non-uniform deployment and uniform deployment with a coverage hole. Simulation results show that ours can achieve better and reliable localization accuracy in these network scenarios.