Co-designed anchor-free localization and location-based routing algorithm for rapidly-deployed wireless sensor networks

We consider a wireless sensor network consisting of a single sink node at the center of a field of randomly distributed sensors. A simple anchor-free localization algorithm is proposed, in which the sink node imparts radial location information through the phased-array transmission of a series of beacons. Each individual sensor uses the knowledge of received beacons as well as information from neighbors to continue partitioning current sectors and identifying sub-sectors in which it resides until an accuracy requirement is satisfied. An energy-preserving routing algorithm is then proposed which uses the localization results as the basis for selecting relay nodes. We present the localization algorithm, analyze its partition errors as well as its impact on communication energy consumption, and then present the location-based routing algorithm. Simulation results indicate that the performance of our co-designed localization and routing algorithm in the presence of severe noise is as good as that provided by a shortest-path routing algorithm under ideal assumptions; therefore, our co-designing approach can achieve high performance with lightweight algorithms.