We consider wireless nodes connected in an ad hoc network where recursion based localization is available and ad hoc routing is deployed. We are interested in studying the possibility to use ad hoc routing to help a mobile (sensor) node in a dense/sparse wireless network to estimate its position by first finding the closest two or three ad hoc reference nodes that are already known their positions then use the position value of the found reference nodes and add the estimated distance using the hop counts of the ad hoc routing to find the estimated position. Our protocol will control which are the nodes that will have to calculate their position using the recursive approach in order to serve as reference points to other nodes in the network. Our proposed algorithm basically includes the improved version of the OLSR protocol mostly about the MPR decision and utilization topics by introducing supplemental selection criteria which are also significant for the localization process. Besides, the first part of the localization is performed with this modified version but at the continuation part, two schemas are used: DV-hop and DV-distance. These two schemas are used in two ways, after finding three anchors to find the position of the related node and if three of the anchors could not be collected then in case of finding anchors. Furthermore, the localized node whose position is detected also assigned as an anchor node in the network. Additionally, we compare our schemas with a recursive position estimation (RPE) algorithm about density, position error and reference point numbers. And t-test is performed in our study for the reference points–densities with p-value of 0.05. 
Recursive and ad hoc routing based localization in wireless sensor networks