School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

A novel distributed localization method based on the Doppler effect for wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper, which only relies on radio transceivers without the need of other auxiliary measurement equipments. Based on radio interference, each sensor node can obtain a multi-group of distance variations from itself to a mobile anchor through the measurement of the cumulative phase variations caused by Doppler effect, by which its position can be determined. The proposed method has the following advantages: the sensor node conducts localization in a completely distributed manner without information exchange or centralized processing, and the measurement result equals the actual distance without modulus operation, which is in reality measuring the distance with a ruler of radio wavelength, and will significantly reduce the system complexity and achieve high location accuracy. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60772095), and the National High-Tech Research & Development Program of China (Grand No. 2006A01Z220).