Improving Localization Ratio in Wireless Sensor Networks using Efficient Path Planning

Localization is one of the challenging area in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), since it requires to maintain an association between the sensed data and corresponding events also it provides fundamental support for many location-aware protocols and applications. Location can also be computed by equipping each node with global positioning system (GPS), but constraints on maintenance and cost of GPS make it infeasible especially for large networks. A approach is to use of mobile anchor nodes, which are equipped with GPS units moving among unknown nodes and periodically broadcast their current locations to help nearby unknown nodes with localization. This method not only reduces the cost of WSNs but also covers more area as compared to static anchor node. In this case, an important issues for localization involves the path planning of anchor node. In this work, we propose a new path planning algorithm and apply on DV-hop localization with the aim of reducing co-linearity and maximizing number of localized nodes. We also implement some of the existing path planning algorithms such as SCAN, LMAT and apply on DV-hop localization algorithm.Simulations are performed using NS-2 simulator. Performance of proposed algorithm shows improvement as compared to existing path planning algorithms in terms of localization ratio