A novel lightweight algorithm for time-space localization in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Azzedine Boukerche;Horacio A. B. F. Oliveira;Eduardo F. Nakamura;Antonio A. F. Loureiro

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada/ Federal University of Amazonas Manaus, AM, Brazil, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil;Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil/ FUCAPI, Manaus, AM, Brazil;Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Modeling, analysis, and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Localization in time and space can be defined as the problem of solving both synchronization and positioning problems at the same time. This is a key problem for wireless sensor networks that need to determine timing and location information of detected phenomena, especially in tracking applications. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between these two problems and propose the Lightness algorithm (Lightweight Time and Space localization), a new time-space localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks. Our proposed algorithm not only takes advantage of the additional hardware resources required by a positioning system to improve the performance and scalability of the synchronization component, but also benefits from the additional communication needed by the synchronization component to decrease positioning errors. We also present an extensive set of experiments to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Our results indicate clearly that the proposed scheme scales to thousands of nodes (over 2048) while keeping a synchronization error of a few microseconds (nearly 10µs) with an O(n) communication cost. The additional packets needed to compute clocks' drift can also be used to decrease the positioning errors to almost one third of the initial positioning.