Wireless sensor network localization using a multistage approach

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are a collection of devices, capable of a limited amount of data processing and communication. The geographic location of sensor nodes is a basic input for many applications of wireless sensor networks. To determine the positions of sensors, numerous localization algorithms have been proposed recently. In this paper, we propose a multistage type localization scheme where trilateration, local search and simulated annealing are applied to determine the positions of the sensors. The performance in terms of localization error and function evaluation number is tested by simulations for different topologies and compared with a well-known simulated annealing method.