A high-accuracy and low-energy range-free localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract As the backbone of the Internet of Things, wireless sensor networks are widely applied to perceive the physical world. Most applications need to associate perception information with a position to generate physical significance. This paper proposes WRCDV-Hop, which has quadruple improvements of the well-known DV-Hop. First, the hop count between a pair of sensor nodes is measured as a continuous value rather than a discrete value. Second, the unknown nodes calculate the average distance per hop by the weighted method. Third, each sensor node only records and relays limited but sufficient beacons of the anchors. Fourth, the unknown nodes apply the whale optimization algorithm to estimate positions. The first two improvements ensure that the distance estimation between a pair of sensor nodes is highly accurate, and the third improvement reduces the energy consumption. The last improvement makes the position estimation more precise. The simulation results show that WRCDV-Hop performs well in terms of localization accuracy and energy consumption.

Keywords

• Wireless sensor network localization
• Range-free
• Whale optimization algorithm
• Hop count