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Anchor‐free distance estimation: A new approach to distance estimation for multihop ad hoc wireless networks
Author(s) -
Mavridopoulos Stathis,
Nicopolitidis Petros,
Papadimitriou Georgios
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.3722
Subject(s) - computer science , hop (telecommunications) , wireless ad hoc network , node (physics) , computer network , metric (unit) , wireless , a priori and a posteriori , wireless sensor network , wireless network , algorithm , telecommunications , philosophy , economics , operations management , structural engineering , epistemology , engineering
Summary In ad hoc wireless networks, devices that normally cannot directly communicate route their messages through intermediate nodes. The number of those nodes is called hop count, a useful metric in estimating the distance between 2 nodes. Current methods usually depend on special nodes, called anchors, that need accurate localization information, in order to calculate an estimate for the average distance traversed per hop. The drawback of this approach is that anchor nodes increase the overall cost and complexity of the system. To address this problem, this letter proposes a novel, anchor node–free algorithm that can achieve a useful estimate for actual distance between 2 nodes, by analytically finding an estimate for the average maximum distance traveled per hop and multiplying with the hop count. The only requirement is the a priori knowledge of the networks' node density and the node range. The performance of our method is compared with a recent anchor node–based method and is shown to yield similar location estimation accuracy, despite the fact that it does not use anchor nodes.