Abstract-Wireless sensor networks have the capability to deliver the environmental data to the user. Among the significant data is the location of the node either in static or mobile. A number of network simulators were extensively reviewed specifically for the development of wireless sensor networks protocol. However, there is little work done in assessing the framework for localization simulation. This paper addresses the lack of the previous surveys by giving the guidelines for localization developer to select the suitable network simulator or programming language. It includes a comparative description on importance features in evaluating the localization algorithm. In addition, it discusses the general performance evaluation metric use for localization. Finally, it list several open issues which help in developing and analyzing the localization algorithm.

The main concern in range-free localization is getting the high accuracy despite sensor has irregular radio pattern and implemented in anisotropic network. Nevertheless not much study on how the localization algorithm can deplete the sensors' energy even though its fundamental approach are highly depending on the connectivity among the nodes and anchors. In this paper three range-free localization, which are Centroid, Approximate Point-In-Triangulation (APIT) and Distance Vector-Hop (DV-Hop) were implemented with the aim of same accuracy. We investigated the energy consumption based on the volume of transmit and receive packets experienced by the sensors during the localization phase. The observation took account the impact number of anchors, nodes density and communication range. The results showed DV-Hop consumed the most energy yet it required the least anchors in order to achieve the targeted accuracy. In APIT as a sensor has larger communication range it leads to more adjoining nodes thus the sensor experienced more energy depletion. Meanwhile in DV-Hop as node density increased, sensors near to anchors have the highest energy consumption since it needs to relay the packets towards anchors. These results suggested an important finding that is as the sensors implemented traditional flooding during localization phase it leads to a significant amount of energy depletion.