Abstract

Background: Many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require awareness of sensor node’s location but not every sensor node can be equipped with a GPS receiver for localization, due to cost and energy constraints especially for large-scale networks. For localization, many algorithms have been proposed to enable a sensor node to be able to determine its location by utilizing a small number of special nodes called anchors that are equipped with GPS receivers. In recent years a promising method that significantly reduces the cost is to replace the set of statically deployed GPS anchors with one mobile anchor node equipped with a GPS unit that moves to cover the entire network.

Methods: This paper proposes a novel static path planning mechanism that enables a single anchor node to follow a predefined static path while periodically broadcasting its current location coordinates to the nearby sensors. This new path type is called SQUARE_SPIRAL and it is specifically designed to reduce the collinearity during localization.

Results: Simulation results show that the performance of SQUARE_SPIRAL mechanism is better than other static path planning methods with respect to multiple performance metrics.

Conclusion: This work includes an extensive comparative study of the existing static path planning methods then presents a comparison of the proposed mechanism with existing solutions by doing extensive simulations in NS-2.

Keywords: Localization, wireless sensor network, mobile anchor node, path planning, multilateration, NS-2.

Graphical Abstract