A Novel Static Path Planning Method for Mobile Anchor-Assisted Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

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