A clustering approach for error beacon filtering in underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor networks are the enabling technology for the aquatic environmental monitoring and exploring and have attracted much attention recently. Due to the highly hostile and unpredictable underwater environments, some beacon nodes tend to move or be damaged. Therefore, the unknown nodes will be positioned with larger error, which abases the value of data collected by sensor nodes. In order to solve the beacon error problem, this article proposes an error beacon filtering algorithm based on K-means clustering. First, the coordinate of each beacon is calculated through an improved trilateration method, and then the beacon with the maximum positioning error is filtered out via the K-means clustering algorithm. The remaining beacons repeat the above processes until the distance error of each beacon does not exceed a preset threshold. The analysis of simulation results indicates that the error beacons can be accurately found and filter out through our proposed error beacon filtering algorithm (based on K-means clustering), and thus the localization accuracy is enhanced. Besides, error beacon filtering algorithm also has a provable low complexity.