Localization of target in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Advances in hardware and wireless network technology have made it possible to build and deploy dense ad-hoc wireless sensor networks of nodes collecting and disseminating information. One problem that arises in ad-hoc wireless sensor networks is the inability of the nodes to locate themselves and the object (events) as well. With a motivation to solve this, we have proposed the following in this thesis: 1. Distributed algorithm for the location of sensors having omni directional radiation pattern using MMSE distance criteria. 2. A low computational complexity grid based technique to find sub set of sensors close to the event of occurrence from the reported set of sensors to query for further information. A MATLAB simulation is done for finding the closest sensor to the event of occurrence, without the knowledge of true positions of all the sensors in the field excluding those that act as anchors. The simulation shows a successful detection percentage of 55 with one-sensor query and 80 with two-sensor query. This detection percentage is close to the detection that is done with the knowledge of true sensor positions in the field.