Development an accurate and stable range-free localization scheme for anisotropic wireless sensor networks

With the high-speed development of wireless radio technology, numerous sensor nodes are integrated into wireless sensor networks, which has promoted plentiful location-based applications that are successfully applied in various fields, such as monitoring natural disasters and post-disaster rescue. Location information is an integral part of wireless sensor networks, without location information, all received data will lose meaning. However, the current localization scheme is based on equipped GPS on every node, which is not cost-efficient and not suitable for large-scale wireless sensor networks and outdoor environments. To address this problem, research scholars have proposed a rangefree localization scheme which only depends on network connectivity. Nevertheless, as the representative range-free localization scheme, Distance Vector-Hop (DV-Hop) localization algorithm demonstrates extremely poor localization accuracy under anisotropic wireless sensor networks. The previous works assumed that the network environment is evenly and uniformly distributed, ignored anisotropic factors in a real setting. Besides, most research academics improved the localization accuracy to a certain degree, but at expense of high communication overhead and computational complexity, which cannot meet the requirements of high-precision applications for anisotropic wireless sensor networks. Hence, finding a fast, accurate, and strong solution to solve the range-free localization problem is still a big challenge. Accordingly, this study aspires to bridge the research gap by exploring a new DV-Hop algorithm to build a fast, costefficient, strong range-free localization scheme. This study developed an optimized variation of the DV-Hop localization algorithm for anisotropic wireless sensor networks. To address the poor localization accuracy problem in irregular C-shaped network topology, it adopts an efficient Grew Wolf Optimizer instead of the least-squares method. The dynamic communication range is introduced to refine hop between anchor nodes, and new parameters are recommended to optimize network protocol to balance energy cost in the initial step. Besides, the weighted coefficient and centroid algorithm is employed to reduce cumulative error by hop count and cut down computational complexity. The developed localization framework is separately validated and evaluated each optimized step under various evaluation criteria, in terms of accuracy, stability, and cost, etc. The results of EGWO-DV-Hop demonstrated superior localization accuracy under both topologies, the average localization error dropped up to 87.79% comparing with basic DV-Hop under C-shaped topology. The developed enhanced DWGWO-DVHop localization algorithm illustrated a favorable result with high accuracy and strong stability. The overall localization error is around 1.5m under C-shaped topology, while the traditional DV-Hop algorithm is large than 20m. Generally, the average localization error went down up to 93.35%, compared with DV-Hop. The localization accuracy and robustness of comparison indicated that the developed DWGWO-DV-Hop algorithm super outperforms the other classical range-free methods. It has the potential significance to be guided and applied in practical location-based applications for anisotropic wireless sensor networks

Target Tracking in Confined Environments with Uncertain Sensor Positions

To ensure safety in confined environments such as mines or subway tunnels, a (wireless) sensor network can be deployed to monitor various environmental conditions. One of its most important applications is to track personnel, mobile equipment and vehicles. However, the state-of-the-art algorithms assume that the positions of the sensors are perfectly known, which is not necessarily true due to imprecise placement and/or dropping of sensors. Therefore, we propose an automatic approach for simultaneous refinement of sensors' positions and target tracking. We divide the considered area in a finite number of cells, define dynamic and measurement models, and apply a discrete variant of belief propagation which can efficiently solve this high-dimensional problem, and handle all non-Gaussian uncertainties expected in this kind of environments. Finally, we use ray-tracing simulation to generate an artificial mine-like environment and generate synthetic measurement data. According to our extensive simulation study, the proposed approach performs significantly better than standard Bayesian target tracking and localization algorithms, and provides robustness against outliers.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201

Cooperative localization by dual foot-mounted inertial sensors and inter-agent ranging

The implementation challenges of cooperative localization by dual foot-mounted inertial sensors and inter-agent ranging are discussed and work on the subject is reviewed. System architecture and sensor fusion are identified as key challenges. A partially decentralized system architecture based on step-wise inertial navigation and step-wise dead reckoning is presented. This architecture is argued to reduce the computational cost and required communication bandwidth by around two orders of magnitude while only giving negligible information loss in comparison with a naive centralized implementation. This makes a joint global state estimation feasible for up to a platoon-sized group of agents. Furthermore, robust and low-cost sensor fusion for the considered setup, based on state space transformation and marginalization, is presented. The transformation and marginalization are used to give the necessary flexibility for presented sampling based updates for the inter-agent ranging and ranging free fusion of the two feet of an individual agent. Finally, characteristics of the suggested implementation are demonstrated with simulations and a real-time system implementation.Comment: 14 page