Path planning for a group of mobile anchor nodes based on regular triangles in wireless sensor networks

Localization is one of the fundamental issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Recently, various localization methods have been proposed. However, using single anchor node introduces quite long localization delay. Therefore, the path planning problem of a Group of Mobile Anchor Nodes (GMAN) is studied in this paper. First, two path planning schemes named GSCAN and GTURN are proposed. Both GSCAN and GTURN use three mobile anchor nodes which traverse the entire network following the designed trajectory to help nearby unknown nodes with localization. Furthermore, in order to improve localization ratio of unknown nodes, two boundary strategies are proposed to guarantee that the movement trajectories of anchor nodes can cover the whole WSN. Simulation results show that GSCAN and GTURN can achieve better localization performance than LMAT, RPGM and Ou's in terms of higher localization ratio and lower energy consumption.