Abstract: To reduce the requirement of hardware in wireless sensor node location,a new and adaptable node relative location approach based on link quality indication(LQI) or receive signal strength indication(RSSI) is investigated.After analyzing a vast amount of data,a two-step curve fitting method is studied to achieve the corresponding relationship between internode distance and RSSI as well as the sender voltage.Through applying the sensor network based on CC2430 and ZigBee protocol,the effects on the distance estimation of two types of fitting method for RF signal attenuation characteristics are discussed.The result shows that the given approach could estimate the diatance between two nodes and locate unknown nodes better.