Abstract: Node localization is crucial to wireless sensor network and both academia and industry pay much attention to it all the times. Existing localization methods are not suitable for three-dimensional terrains due to their design for planar applications, but in realistic application, the sensor nodes always distribute in threcdimensions, so study on the localization in three-dimensions will be much more in line with the actual application. According to the shortage of some existing algorithms proposed for threcdimensional space, a novel threcdimensional localization algorithm in wireless sensor networks was proposed. This algorithm needs no additional hardware support. I}his scheme establishes a vector space model based on the number of the anchor nodes from the communication range of unknown node, and when estimating unknown node coordinate, anchors in the unknown node communication region constraint the estimation range of unknown nodes. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm is of great advantages in low communication overhcad and improving coverage rate of location and location accuracy.

Key words: Node localization, Wireless sensor network, Three-dimensional localization, Unknown node, Anchor nodes