Jumps: Enhancing Hop-Count Positioning in Sensor Networks Using Multiple Coordinates

Positioning systems in self-organizing networks generally rely on measurements such as delay and received signal strength, which may be difficult to obtain and often require dedicated equipment. An alternative to such approaches is to use simple connectivity information, that is, the presence or absence of a link between any pair of nodes, and to extend it to hop-counts, in order to obtain an approximate coordinate system. Such an approximation is sufficient for a large number of applications, such as routing. In this paper, the authors propose Jumps, a positioning system for those self-organizing networks in which other types of (exact) positioning systems cannot be used or are deemed to be too costly. Jumps builds a multiple coordinate system based solely on nodes' neighborhood knowledge.