Accurate Range-Free Localization Algorithms Based on PSO for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, localization accuracy of unknown nodes has become a critical and challenging issue for many Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Without associating the detected event with its precise geographic location will be surely considered meaningless for these applications. Among all localization algorithms, we observe that the DV-Hop localization algorithm is highly recommended to use in many fields of application due to its simplicity, feasibility, low cost, and no extra hardware requirements, but the localization error caused by the DV-Hop algorithm is relatively large. In this current work, based on both the DV-Hop algorithm and the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, we proposed four new localization algorithms to overcome the shortcomings of low accuracy that the basic DV-Hop based algorithms produce. The simulation results showed that the proposed localization algorithms can achieve a better localization performance in terms of accuracy in comparison with other existing algorithms such as basic DV-Hop, MDV-Hop and DV-Hop PSO under different random network topologies. We also observed that a significant localization accuracy is achieved by the proposed algorithm HWDV-HopPSO.