Low overhead assignment of symbolic coordinates in sensor networks

Approximate information on the location of nodes in a sensor network is essential to many types of sensor network applications and algorithms. In many cases, using symbolic coordinates is an attractive alternative to the use of geographic coordinates due to lower costs and lower requirements on the available location information during coordinate assignment. In this paper, we investigate different possible methods of assigning symbolic coordinates to sensor nodes. We present a method based on broadcasting coordinate messages and filtering using sensor events. We show in the evaluation that this method allows a reliable assignment of symbolic coordinates while only generating a low overhead.