Sensor location
2005/12/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria
In recent years several electronic components have been commercialized using radio communication. The marketing of these components has generated new applications such as wireless sensor networks.
The sensors of these systems are installed in autonomous circuits. In this way, control and measurement tasks can be distributed, for example, to measure the magnitude of a wide geographical area. The main advantage of this type of network is the dubbing: having so many sensors in the network, if one breaks, another will fulfill its function until the broken is replaced.
However, the coordination of so many sensors is not easy: they all have the same hardware and software, in addition to having energy consumption and limited processing capacity. In this case, operating protocols are greatly simplified if the position of each sensor and the geographic distribution of the network are known. It should be noted that, since there are no cables, it is not easy to locate the sensors. The presence of so many sensors makes it impossible for everyone to measure these locations. Therefore, an automated method is necessary for each sensor to calculate its position.
Jagoba Arias from the UPV has proposed and developed a new algorithm for calculating the position of sensors. The distance to other sensors is used to find this position. However, in order for these systems to be economically viable, each sensor must be very economical, both in design and production. Sensors cannot contain complex electronics, so these measurements are not expected to be very accurate.
The algorithm proposed in the study performs the calculation for each sensor, knowing that known distances present defects. Finally, a simulation platform has been developed to compare the results obtained with other algorithms proposed in recent years. In this way you can see the number of calculation tasks that each sensor must perform and how they influence the result obtained by the errors.
