Performance evaluation of hop-based range-free localization methods in wireless sensor networks

Knowledge of nodes' locations is an important requirement for many applications in Wireless Sensor Networks. In the hop-based range-free localization methods, anchors broadcast the localization messages including a hop count value to the entire network. Each node receives this message and calculates its own distance with anchor in hops and then approximates its own location. In this paper, we review range-free localization methods and evaluate the performance of two methods: "DV-hop" and "amorphous" by simulation. We consider some parameters like localization accuracy, energy consumption, and network overhead. Recent papers that evaluate localization methods mostly concentrated on localization accuracy. But we have considered a group of evaluation parameters, energy consuming, and network overhead in addition to the location accuracy.