Low communication cost (LCC) scheme for localizing mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In recent years, the number of applications utilizing mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased, with the intent of localization for the purposes of monitoring and obtaining data from hazardous areas. Location of the event is very critical in WSN, as sensing data is almost meaningless without the location information. In this paper, two Monte Carlo based localization schemes termed MCL and MSL* are studied. MCL obtains its location through anchor nodes whereas MSL* uses both anchor nodes and normal nodes. The use of normal nodes would increase accuracy and reduce dependency on anchor nodes, but increases communication costs. For this reason, we introduce a new approach called low communication cost schemes to reduce communication cost. Unlike MSL* which chooses all normal nodes found in the neighbor, the proposed scheme uses set theory to only select intersected nodes. To evaluate our method, we simulate in our proposed scheme the use of the same MSL* settings and simulators. From the simulation, we find out that our proposed scheme is able to reduce communication cost—the number of messages sent—by a minimum of 0.02 and a maximum of 0.30 with an average of 0.18, for varying node densities from 6 to 20, while nonetheless able to retain similar MSL* accuracy rates.