An empirical study of ad-hoc sensor network for localization on the practical issues

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has recently become a tremendous application and research area. Accordingly, localization issue of WSN is getting more and more attention. However, it is well known that WSN is quite complicated in a real environment due to the characteristic of ad-hoc network and radio transmission. This thesis studies the problem of localization using wireless sensor network over practical issues in real environment. We carefully design a series of experiments using Telosb and Micaz nodes, and implement some hop count algorithms in order to analyze the physical constrains to these algorithms and discuss the performance over practical issues in a comprehensive and quantitative way. Moreover, we propose some modifications to improve the original hop count algorithm in the light of physical sensor network implementation. The experimental results show that, our modifications perform better than the existing works. Our work should be beneficial to research who want to develop practical localization system in sensor networks.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology