Multi-objective optimization for a reliable localization scheme in wireless sensor networks

In many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, the information transmitted by an individual entity or node is of limited use without the knowledge of its location. Research in node localization is mostly geared towards multi-hop range-free localization algorithms to achieve accuracy by minimizing localization errors between the node's actual and estimated position. The existing localization algorithms are focused on improving localization accuracy without considering efficiency in terms of energy costs and algorithm convergence time. In this work, we show that our proposed localization scheme, called DV-maxHop, can achieve good accuracy and efficiency. We formulate the multi-objective optimization functions to minimize localization errors as well as the number of transmission during localization phase. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using extensive simulation on several anisotropic and isotropic topologies. Our scheme can achieve dual objective of accuracy and efficiency for various scenarios. Furthermore, the recently proposed algorithms require random uniform distribution of anchors. We also utilized our proposed scheme to compare and study some practical anchor distribution schemes.