Critical Analysis of Distributed Localization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the past decade, Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted very much attention from the research and industrial community. Various WSN based projects produced fruitful and interesting results. In various applications, the location information of node is vital for the service. The reason is that users usually need to know what happens, but also where the concerned events happen. For example, in battlefield surveillance, the knowledge of where the enemy comes from can be much more important than only knowing the appearance of the enemy, it is much important that sensors reports the information along with their location. Localization is one of the primary and widely useful middle-ware services in sensor networks, mostly allows every node to obtain its location information. The localization schemes can be categorized on the basis of various parameters like availability of GPS, presence of anchors, range measurements, model of computation etc. On the basis of computation model, the localization approaches can be categorized into: centralized and distributed localization techniques. Due to certain advantages, distributed localization is flattering as an active stem in sensor localization. In this paper, we have been reported a detailed analysis on distributed localization techniques and outline the merits and limitations of distributed localization schemes in WSNs. Finally, we conclude the paper with some open issues.