Swarm Intelligence Optimization Techniques for Obstacle-Avoidance Mobility-Assisted Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), node location is required to locate the monitored event once occurs. Mobility-assisted localization has emerged as an efficient technique for node localization. It works on optimizing a path planning of a location-aware mobile node, called mobile anchor (MA). The task of the MA is to traverse the area of interest (network) in a way that minimizes the localization error while maximizing the number of successful localized nodes. For simplicity, many path planning models assume that the MA has a sufficient source of energy and time, and the network area is obstacle-free. However, in many real-life applications such assumptions are rare. When the network area includes many obstacles, which need to be avoided, and the MA itself has a limited movement distance that cannot be exceeded, a dynamic movement approach is needed. In this paper, we propose two novel dynamic movement techniques that offer obstacle-avoidance path planning for mobility-assisted localization in WSNs. The movement planning is designed in a real-time using two swarm intelligence based algorithms, namely grey wolf optimizer and whale optimization algorithm. Both of our proposed models, grey wolf optimizer-based path planning and whale optimization algorithm-based path planning, provide superior outcomes in comparison to other existing works in several metrics including both localization ratio and localization error rate.