A weighted centroid localization algorithm for randomly deployed wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Localization is one of the important requirements in wireless sensor networks for tracking and analyzing the sensed data/events. In most of the applications of wireless sensor networks, the event information without its location information has no significance. The well known traditional Distance-Vector Hop (DV Hop) algorithm and weighted centroid DV Hop based algorithms can be easily implemented in real wireless sensor networks with low cost and no additional hardware requirement, but it has poor localization accuracy and high power consumption. In order to avoid these limitations, a weighted centroid DV-Hop algorithm is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm uses weights that consider the influence of different factors such as number of anchors, communication radius, and nearest anchor to determine location of unknown node. Simulation results and theoretical analysis prove that proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional DV-Hop algorithm in terms of localization error and power consumption. Keywords: Localization, Wireless sensor networks, DV-Hop, Weighted centroid algorithm, Localization error, Power consumption