Abstract: Every node in network needs to know the identity and location of its neighbors to support processing and collaboration. This can be easily obtained in a planned network and quite hard in ad hoe networks whose topology is constructed and updated in real time. Self-location using GPS may not be feasible but an effective distributed positioning algorithm is to be used. The proposed technique is a distributed infrastructure free positioning algorithm which achieves robustness through iterative propagation of information through a network. The 2 primary obstacles to positioning in an ad-hoc network like sparse anchor node problem and  the range error problem are considered. In order to meet the above problems the new distributed algorithm is generated. This algorithm consists of two phases: start-up and refinement. For the start-up phase the Hop-TERRAIN algorithm is used to overcome the sparse anchor node problem and refinement algorithm is used to refine the position estimates generated by Hop-TERRAIN.