Force-Directed Approaches to Sensor Localization

Abstract

As the number of applications of sensor networks increases so does the interest in sensor network localization that is in recovering the correct position of each node in a network of sensors from partial connectivity information such as adjacency range or angle between neighboring nodes. In this article we consider the anchor-free localization problem in sensor networks that report possibly noisy range information and angular information about the relative order of each sensor's neighbors. Previously proposed techniques seem to successfully reconstruct the original positions of the nodes for relatively small networks with nodes distributed in simple regions. However these techniques do not scale well with network size and yield poor results with nonconvex or nonsimple underlying topology. Moreover the distributed nature of the problem makes some of the centralized techniques inapplicable in distributed settings. To address these problems we describe a multiscale dead-reckoning (MSDR) algorithm that scales well for large networks can reconstruct complex underlying topologies and is resilient to noise. The MSDR algorithm takes its roots from classic force-directed graph layout computation techniques. These techniques are augmented with a multiscale extension to handle the scalability issue and with a dead-reckoning extension to overcome the problems arising with nonsimple topologies. Furthermore we show that the distributed version of the MSDR algorithm performs as well as if not better than its centralized counterpart as shown by the quality of the layout measured in terms of the accuracy of the computed pairwise distances between sensors in the network.