Robust wireless multihop localization using mobile anchors

Abstract

Knowing the position of sensor nodes in an environmental monitoring is useful to identify the location of events. However deploying GPS receivers or other anchor sensors is expensive, since the role of anchor nodes ends after localizing sensor nodes' positions and they are transferred into ordinary sensor nodes. In this paper, we introduce a new localization scheme for a wireless sensor network that can localize sensor nodes using a collinear and non-collinear mobile anchor node. This scheme benefits from the estimated distance between neighbor nodes and additional information provided by the anchor node about the flow direction of the message. Each node localizes it's position from two independent directions. A Kalman Filter is then used to improve the location accuracy for each node. Through simulation studies, we show that the scheme using a Kalman Filter decreases the estimation errors than using single direction by 31% and 16% better than using weighted averages. As well, our new scheme overcomes the collinearity problem that appears from using mobile anchor nodes.