A New Range-Free and Storage-Efficient Localization Algorithm Using Neural Networks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network is one of the new technologies that have gotten more attention in the past few years. The localization problem is one of the most important topics in these types of the networks. The traditional positioning techniques cannot be used in these networks due to the hardware restrictions of the sensor nodes. Lately, some positioning methods which use soft computing approaches such as neural networks, are proposed for solving the localization problem. In this paper, we propose a new range-free localization algorithm which uses the neural networks for this purpose. This method utilizes Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to optimize the number of neurons of hidden layers of neural networks. The objective function considers both localization accuracy and storage overhead, simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is implemented and simulated in isotropic networks with and without coverage hole, and anisotropic networks. The obtained result show, in the different environmental conditions, the proposed algorithm has a less localization error rate and less storage requirement than the analogous methods.