Efficient localization for large-scale underwater sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we study the localization problem in large-scale underwater sensor networks. The adverse aqueous environments, the node mobility, and the large network scale all pose new challenges, and most current localization schemes are not applicable. We propose a hierarchical approach which divides the whole localization process into two sub-processes: anchor node localization and ordinary node localization. Many existing techniques can be used in the former. For the ordinary node localization process, we propose a distributed localization scheme which novelly integrates a 3-dimensional Euclidean distance estimation method with a recursive location estimation method. Simulation results show that our proposed solution can achieve high localization coverage with relatively small localization error and low communication overhead in large-scale 3-dimensional underwater sensor networks.