Weighted Centroid Localization in Zigbee-based Sensor Networks

Localization in wireless sensor networks gets more and more important, because many applications need to locate the source of incoming measurements as precise as possible. Weighted centroid localization (WCL) provides a fast and easy algorithm to locate devices in wireless sensor networks. The algorithm is derived from a centroid determination which calculates the position of devices by averaging the coordinates of known reference points. To improve the calculated position in real implementations, WCL uses weights to attract the estimated position to close reference points provided that coarse distances are available. Due to the fact that Zigbee provides the link quality indication (LQI) as a quality indicator of a received packet, it can also be used to estimate a distance from a node to reference points.