Anchor node path planning for localization in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Localization is one of the most important challenges of wireless sensor networks because the location information is typically used in other domains such as coverage, deployment, routing, and target tracking. There exist some localization algorithms that facilitate the sensor nodes to locate itself using the mobile anchor node position. Some crucial attempts have been made in the past for optimizing the mobile anchor node trajectory with good accuracy. This paper presents a novel path planning scheme, D-connect, which ensures the localization of all the sensor nodes with minimum trajectory length. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through a series of simulations. Experimental results reveal that the shortest path for traversing the whole area can be traced with the minimum localization error using this method. It also shows that D-connect outperforms the existing methods in terms of the anchor node trajectory length as well as the localization error.