Comparison of Proactive vs. Reactive Localization Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Comparison of Proactive vs. Reactive Localization Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Randomly deployed nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN) gain benefit of being aware of their location for routing or delivering meaningful information to the base station. Many WSN localization methods have been investigated in terms of their convergence, position refinement or need of a reference coordinate system. In this paper, we present a study on two possible ways of using twoway ranging technique for range based sensor node localization. Two-way ranging technique has gained popularity in WSNs since it does not require clock synchronization in inexpensive and energy constrained sensor nodes. We present two distributed techniques for localization using two-way ranging. These techniques use two different approaches for localization, one is the proactive approach and the other is the reactive approach. In the proactive approach, localization process is initiated by the localized nodes, whereas, the later the process is initiated by the non-localized nodes. We compare the two techniques in terms of their convergence condition, convergence delay and communication cost.