RSD: A metric for achieving range-free localization beyond connectivity

Wireless sensor networks have been considered as a promising tool for many location-dependent applications. In such deployments, the requirement of low system cost prohibits many range-based methods for sensor node localization; on the other hand, range-free approaches depending only on radio connectivity may underutilize the proximity information embedded in neighborhood sensing. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces a proximity metric called RSD to capture the distance relationships among 1-hop neighboring nodes in a range-free manner. With little overhead, RSD can be conveniently applied as a transparent supporting layer for state-of-the-art connectivity-based localization solutions to achieve better accuracy. We implemented RSD with three well-known algorithms and evaluated using two outdoor test beds: an 850-foot-long linear network with 54 MICAz motes, and a regular 2D network covering an area of 10,000 square feet with 49 motes. Results show that our design helps eliminate estimation ambiguity with a subhop resolution, and reduces localization errors by as much as 35 percent. In addition, simulations confirm its effectiveness for large-scale networks and reveal an interesting feature of robustness under unevenly distributed radio path loss.