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I. INTRODUCTION
In the recent years, the wireless communication industry has
launched new (and cheaper) integrated circuits for providing
connectivity to digital systems. As a result, new applications
based on this technology have appeared, which take advantage
of this new capability. An example of this are wireless sensor networks [ I]. These networks consist of a reIatively high
number of inexpensive (and usually unattended) nodes, which
are able to share data using wireless transceivers. Their weak
nature involves some restrictions to their working conditions:
Being inexpensive nodes, they are prone to failure. They
main force of this network does not lay on the reliability of its node but on their number: being many nodes,
some may fail at a certain moment, but they will restart
afterwards. During their off time some other nodes will
perform their tasks for them.
Having unattended nodes means that there will be power
consumption restrictions for the nodes. Rechargeable batteries using solar cells or some other renewable power supplies are required to maintain the nodes working.
Small and cheap nodes cannot perform complicated computational operations. Nodes in these networks will have
little memory and low computing capabilities - which
eases the previously mentioned problem of power consumption.
These restrictions must be overcome to provide some services to the user:
0-7803*8662-0/O4/!20
.OO 02004 IEEE
The nodes, which are scattered in a relatively wide geographical area, may not be able to communicate with each
single node in the network. Therefore, they must cooperate to move the information from the sources to their sinks.
The user must be able to know the value of each measurement as fast as possible.
I The sensors must be. able to calibrate themselves automatically - it would be a nightmare, if a human operator had
to manually calibrate several hundreds of nodes [ 2 ] .
The whole structure of the network must not suffer if some
nodes die for some time.
Wireless sensor networks have been normally used in some
typical environments:
Habitat monitoring: there is a large [and usually inaccessible) area, where some protected species live. The objective
of the network is to control the presence of these animals,
and the different magnitudes that may affect their quality
of life (temperature, humidity, etc) [3].
Area surveillance: in this case, the aim of the network is
to detect the presence of hostile elements in a certain area,
sending alerts to a surveillance center [4].
Medical care: this time the wireless sensors are installed
in each patient of a medical facility. If the sensors observe
some kind of abnormal behavior of the patients constants,
they will send an alarm to the nearest doctor [ 5 ] .
However, these sensor networks may aIso be applied in the
industry to control the behavior of large machines (or even large
groups of cooperating machines). In this case, each node will
have sensors and actuators, so that both kinds of action can be
taken: on one hand, different magnitudes can be measured and,
on the other hand, the node can perform some operations on the
system under control.
Most of the operations described so far require that the location of cach node is known: it is useless to know that sensor 47h
has measured a temperature of 34OC,if we do not know where
this sensor is, routing procedures may be easier to perform if
the geographical structure of the network is known, etc [6]. In
this paper, a location algorithm is described, which may be used
in industrial applications, in order to improve the performance
of wireless sensor networks used in this area.
This article is organized as follows: in section II, the work
related to localization in wireless sensor networks is described.
757
The location aIgorithm is described in section III and its performance under different circumstances is measured and quantified in section N.The final conclusions of this work can be
found in section V.
11. RELATEDWORK
cons will provide the reference system and the necessary information to find the rest of nodes in the network. In general,
for wireless sensor networks, the most commonly used location methods are based on distance estimation (PoA and ToA),
because the detection of angles or frequencies usually require
more complex equipment (antennae, whose radiation pattern
rotates mechanically or electronically, complex signal processing circuits, etc). Among the other algorithms that calculate the
position of a node using distance estimations, the most typical
ones are described in the following subsections.
(.-.a)
2
3:
2.
f (y - y i )
+ xi - 2x21 + yz + y;
2
- yyi
(1)
Now, the position of the target is updated, using the convertion parameter X E ( 0 , l ) :
I
I
+-F?
I
I
Unknown
Node
Beacon
Fig. I
111. ALGORITHM
OVERVIEW
a=
i= 1
r$i
%=1
. fi
(3)
IV. RESULTS
A. Simulation Environment
Location algorithms depend heavily on the relative position of nodes, errors made in distance estimations, etc. This
is the reason why a testbench, which provides a stable scenario, where the different location algorithms may be tested,
is needed. For this purpose, the user defines the dimensions of
the scenario and the number of beacons that the node to be located (the target) is going to detect. For each simulation run,
the testbench:
Deploys the beacons and the target in the scenario. The
deploying strategy may be defined manually or an automatic uniform random distribution is used. This ensures,
that for each run the beacons and target are redistributed,
providing new relative positions among them.
Makes the distance estimation. To do so, the exact distance
is calculated and then, some kind of error is added, in order
to corrupt the data and evaluate the performance of a location algorithm in an environment with errors. These errors
may be of different natures, attending to the different characteristics of the different distance estimation techniques:
- Additive errors: a random variable is added to the actual distance value. The stochastic properties of the
error, such as probability distribitioa, mean and standard deviation may be specified by the user, allowing
the estimation of the behavior of the algorithm with
different distance estimation techniques.
759
IO
multiplied by the actual distance value. Thus, a relative error is modeled, instead of an additive noise,
which was the case in the previous error description.
Using the same node distribution and the same distance estimations, the testbench calculates the position of the target using different algorithms. The difference between the
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The computational cost of the algorithm, for different values of &hres is shown in figure 4(b). In this figure, it can be
stated that for low values of
the cost is greater than
v.
CONCLUSIONS AND
FUTURE
WORK
'"I
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