Cooperative localization in small world wireless sensor networks

Small world characteristics (SWC) have been observed and studied in a wide range of disciplines such as social, biological, electrical and computer networks. However, the significance of SWC in wireless sensor network (WSN) applications has hitherto not been investigated. This work investigates the significance of introducing SWC in a conventional WSN for improving the accuracy of WSN node localization. In this context, nodes with large radio range are utilized to introduce SWC into a conventional WSN. Subsequently, a cooperative node localization method over the small world WSN using multidimensional scaling is developed. The proposed method yields improved localization performance when compared to node localization over conventional WSN.