Force-directed approaches to sensor localization

Abstract

We consider the centralized, anchor-free sensor localization problem. We consider the case where the sensor network reports range information and the case where in addition to the range, we also have angular information about the relative order of each sensor's neighbors. We experimented with classic and new force-directed techniques. The classic techniques work well for small networks with nodes distributed in simple regions. However, these techniques do not scale well with network size and yield poor results with noisy data. We describe a new force-directed technique, based on a multi-scale dead-reckoning, that scales well for large networks, is resilient under range errors, and can reconstruct complex underlying regions.