On demand-driven movement strategy for moving beacons in sensor localization

In wireless sensor networks, estimating sensor location demands a large number of neighbor location references due to the unavoidable wireless signal attenuation problem. However, the cost of deployment increases with the increase in beacon location references. This limitation can be overcome using moving beacons exploiting the control over the number, position, and strength of beacon transmissions. In this scenario, the trade-off between localization cost and accuracy, which are directly linked up with anchor movement and transmission pattern, introduces many challenges that have recently attracted research interest. This paper aims to propose a noise-tolerant and cost-effective range-free localization technique using moving beacons that localize randomly deployed sensor nodes within a maximum localization error bound while minimizing the cost of beacon traversal and transmissions. We found that the mean localization error can be kept within 20–35% of the maximum transmission radius by selecting the movement and beacon transmission parameters according to user demand. The proposed schemes are compared with other works and also shown to be robust against positional errors of the moving beacon.