Multi-hop distance estimation method based on regulated neighbourhood measure

Range-free localisation methods are suitable for large scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks because of their less-demanding hardware requirements. Many existing connectivity- or hop-count-based range-free localisation methods suffer from the hop-distance ambiguity problem where a node has a same distance estimation to all of its one-hop neighbours. In this study, the authors define a new measure, called regulated neighbourhood distance (RND), to address this problem by relating the proximity of two neighbours to their neighbour partitions. Furthermore, the authors propose a new RND-based range-free localisation method, and the simulation results show that it outperforms two existing peer algorithms in uniform and non-uniform network deployments.