Node Sequence Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

In many application areas for wireless sensor networks, having some location knowledge about the sensor nodes is important, but this information is often not readily available. In the past, plethora of different solutions have been proposed that focused on recovering the locations of the sensor nodes, often at the cost of high complexity or limited accuracy. We claim that, in many scenarios the precise location in the x, y, z coordinates is not really needed. Frequently, due to the scenario of usage, the set of potential locations of the nodes is limited, and assigning the nodes to proper potential position is sufficient. In this study, we consider a single dimensional case and we introduce a novel methodology to detect the geographic sequence of wireless sensor nodes indoors, using only a limited number of message exchanges among the involved nodes and statistical reasoning applied to the set of received signal strength measurements. The proposed approach is verified experimentally in heavy non-line-of-sight settings with high shadowing and multipath distortions.