An energy-efficient DV-hop localization algorithm

Abstract

Sensor location plays an important role in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), so that developing sensor localization algorithms has gained much attention from both academia and industries. Among existing solutions, range-free localization algorithms, including the well-known DV-Hop algorithm, are a promising one due to its independence of any dedicated hardware, but usually suffer from low accuracy and high energy consumptions. In this paper, a novel localization algorithm based on the DV-Hop algorithm is proposed by trading off the overall energy consumption and localization accuracy. Unlike the traditional DV-Hop algorithm, the proposed algorithm replaces the stationary TTL-based mechanism by a dynamic and distributed mechanism. Specifically, provided that a new packet with TTL = 0 arrives, the current sensor will evaluate a coarse goodness value based on the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), and then determines whether it is necessary to forward this packet to its neighboring sensors which are distant from the source anchor flooding this packet. As a result, the packets transmitted are significantly reduced, but the localization accuracy is not evidently degraded. To validate the proposed algorithm, simulations are conducted and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly decreases network communications by an average of 25.71% and 55% compared to the traditional DV-Hop algorithm and the existing improved DV-Hop algorithms, respectively.