DV-hop localization algorithm with multi-power beacons under noisy environment

Applications based on geographical location are increasing rapidly in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Localization algorithm research has drawn wide attention in recent years and brought about many sophisticated algorithms. The majority of localization algorithms can be divided into range-free or range-based, based on whether they use range information. Range-based algorithms are being pursued as a cost-effective alternative due to the hardware limitations of devices. DV-hop is one of the range-free localization algorithms using equal per-hop distance. However, DV-hop cannot precisely estimate the distance between an anchor and a sensor node, since it simply uses hop-count, which is incremented by 1 to calculate per-hop distance. Thus, per-hop distance must be equal, even though the actual distance of each hop is differs. In this paper, each node emits multi-power beacon signals; thus, signal range differs and the signals are used for the criterion of per-hop distance. Thus, we can estimate distance more accurately. Simulations show our proposed algorithm outperforms DV-hop by 11.57%R. The proposed algorithm demonstrates noticeable improvement, as the number of signals increases in the case of a noisy environment.