Mobile anchor assisted particle swarm optimization (PSO) based localization algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Node localization is essential to wireless sensor networks (WSN) and its applications. In this paper, we propose a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based localization algorithm (PLA) for WSNs with one or more mobile anchors. In PLA, each mobile anchor broadcasts beacons periodically, and sensor nodes locate themselves upon the receipt of multiple such messages. PLA does not require anchors to move along an optimized or a pre-determined path. This property makes it suitable for WSN applications in which data-collection and network management are undertaken by mobile data sinks with known locations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that PSO is used in range-free localization in a WSN with mobile anchors. We further derive the upper bound on the localization error using Centroid method and PLA. Simulation results show that PLA can achieve high performance in various scenarios. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.