Address Vector Multi Hop (AV_MH) Algorithm for Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Localization is an essential process in many wireless sensors networks applications like environmental surveillance and forest fires detection, where sensors are usually randomly thrown in difficult to reach places, considering the limited wireless sensors capability in terms of energy availability and the capacity of computations a low cost and energy conservation algorithms are needed to determine the approximate position of the sensors. In this research a new algorithm was proposed ‘Address Vector Multi-Hop (AV_MH)’ to determine the position of the randomly deployed sensors, this algorithm is based on the idea of making benefit from short address assignment in networks that support hierarchical addressing, considering that the most important techniques used in the field of sensor networks such as ZigBee and 6LowPAN which depend on the IEEE802.15.4 standard support this type of addressing. The results showed the possibility of obtaining an approximate position of the wireless sensors in a rapid and inexpensive and cost-effective way in terms of the number of sent messages and required calculations.