Four-mobile-beacon assisted localization in three-dimensional wireless sensor networks

Localization is one of key technologies of wireless sensor networks, and the mobile beacon assisted localization method is promising. For the three-dimensional sensor networks, this paper proposes a four-mobile-beacon assisted weighted centroid localization method. The four beacons form a regular tetrahedron while traversing the region and broadcast packets including their positions simultaneously. The ordinary sensor nodes estimate their locations using weighted centroid method. It also presents Layered-Scan trajectory of mobile beacons which consists of several parallel layers of Scan. This method can localize all the sensor nodes with appropriate parameters. Two sets of simulations are performed using Matlab to compare this method with other methods and evaluate tradeoffs between localization performance and different parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms weighted centroid and multilateration methods using single mobile beacon.

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► We propose a four-mobile-beacon assisted localization method for 3D WSNs.
► We propose its moving trajectory covering entire region.
► We present the appropriate parameter to localize all unknown nodes.
► We evaluate the localization performance and different parameters by simulations.