In this paper we present an experimental study of trilateration and probabilistic multilateration. Both methods are techniques aimed at estimating the location of a point, based on the position of three or more references and distances to them. To asses the effectiveness of the aforementioned methods, we present a characterization of the various error conditions, a sensitivity analysis of the trilateration and probabilistic multila-teration to measure the level of collinearity among references, and a simulation-based analysis describing the results of detailed simulation experiments used to study the performance of DV-Hop that use trilateration as method to estimate the position of their nodes, as well as the version of DV-Hop that use probabilistic multilateration for the same purpose. DV-Hop is the most representative range-free positioning algorithms in the context of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our experimental results show that the probabilistic multilateration method is superior to the traditional trilateration method.