Geometric sensitivity of beacon placement using airborne mobile anchors

Locating fixed sensing devices with a mobile anchor is attractive for covering larger deployment areas. However, the performance sensitivity to the geometric arrangement of anchor beacon positions remains unexplored. Therefore, localization using new RSSI-based localization algorithm, which uses a volumetric probability distribution function is proposed to find the most likely position of a node by information fusion from several mobile beacon radio packets to reduce error over deterministic approaches. This paper presents the guidelines of beacon selection that leads to design the most suitable trajectory, as a trade-off between the energy costs of travelling and transmitting the beacons versus the localization accuracy

A Distributed Method to Localization for Mobile Sensor Networks

International audienceMobile wireless sensors need to know their local- izations in many control and monitoring applications. Among all sensors, some know their exact position (i.e., they are equipped with GPS or they are positioned by human intervention). These sensors are called anchors. Some sensors can have different capabilities allowing them to calculate either distances or angles when they receive messages from others nodes. So, they only use anchor positions to obtain an estimated position. However, when sensors are mobile they cannot continuously calculate their position because of the energy constraints. This paper concerns the localization problem in the case where all nodes in the network (anchors and others sensors) are mobile. We propose three techniques following the capabilities of nodes. Thus, each node obtains either an exact position or an approximate position with the knowledge of the maximal error born. Also, we adapt the periods where nodes invoke their localization. Simulation results show the performances of our methods in term of accuracy and determinate the technique the more adapted related to the network configurations