Neighbor-based hop size estimation for dense sensor networks

Location information is crucial for many applications in wireless sensor networks. Many types of localization algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Off-shelf sensors equipped with no specialized hardware are inexpensive and have made range-free localization schemes the most practical, especially in a large-scale sensor network. However, the range-free schemes have seldom considered the impact of the local neighborhood, the number of neighbors, or estimation of the communication hop distance of a node. In this paper, we use the local neighborhood to define the communication hop distance, called the single hop size (SHS), of a node. In addition, we propose a novel correction scheme, called SCS (SHS correction scheme), for multi-hop range-free localization. Compared to other range-free methods, SCS significantly reduces errors in position determination, even when the number of anchor nodes is low.