An error beacon filtering algorithm based on particle swarm optimization for underwater wireless sensor networks

Due to the sophisticated environmental variations of water current, underwater creature touch, and strong electromagnetic interference, some beacon nodes tend to move or be damaged, which thus results in larger positioning errors of ordinary nodes. In order to solve the error beacon problem, this paper proposes an error beacon filtering algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO), which can differentiate the beacon accurately. Firstly, several location errors of beacons are calculated by an improved Trilateration, and then the beacon with the maximum positioning error is filtered out through PSO. The remaining beacons are filtered out consecutively until the location error of each beacon does not exceed a preset threshold. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can detect almost all error beacons effectively with smaller variances.