Original MDS is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method that inputs distance matrix and outputs the coordinates of the objects (Wiki). An example is the “Voting patterns in the United States House of Representatives” in Figure 1.

voting pattern

Figure 1. An example of original MDS: Voting pattern (Figure from Wiki).

MDS used in Sensor Network

In paper [1], they propose the method MDS-MAP that can conduct the localization of the sensors with only connectivity information. Paper [2] is a improved version of MDS-MAP that works well even in the irregularly-shaped network.

Ref.

[1] Shang, Y., Ruml, W., Zhang, Y., & Fromherz, M. P. (2003, June). Localization from mere connectivity. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking & computing (pp. 201-212). ACM. [2] Shang, Y., & Ruml, W. (2004, March). Improved MDS-based localization. In INFOCOM 2004. Twenty-third AnnualJoint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Vol. 4, pp. 2640-2651). IEEE.