Nour Zaarour, Nadir Hakem and NahiKandil, UQAT-LRTCS, Canada

In wireless sensor networks (WSN) high-accuracy localization is crucial for both of WNS management and many other numerous location-based applications. Only a subset of nodes in a WSN is deployed as anchor nodes with their locations a priori known to localize unknown sensor nodes. The accuracy of the estimated position depends on the number of anchor nodes. Obviously, increasing the number or ratio of anchors will undoubtedly increase the localization accuracy. However, it severely constrains the flexibility of WSN deployment while impacting costs and energy. This paper aims to drastically reduce anchor number or ratio of anchor in WSN deployment and ensures a good trade-off for localization accuracy. Hence, this work presents an approach to decrease the number of anchor nodes without compromising localization accuracy. Assuming a random string WSN topology, the results in terms of anchor rates and localization accuracy are presented and show significant reduction in anchor deployment rates from 32% to 2%.

Wireless sensor network (WSN), anchors, received signal strength (RSS), localization, path-loss exponent (PLE), connectivity.