Localization mechanism with mobile reference node in grid-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are based on monitoring or managing the sensing area by using the location information with sensor nodes. These sensor nodes are sometimes random deployed, so they have to be aware to their location before starting their tasks. Most sensor nodes need hardware support or receive packets with location information to estimate their location, and this needs lots of time or costs, and may have a huge error. In this paper we present a localization mechanism in wireless sensor networks (MRN). This mechanism can cooperate with node localization algorithm and mobile reference node moving direction scheme. We use a mobile reference node with GPS to move to the whole environment, and we use RSSI and trilateration to estimate unknown nodes' location. We can obtain more unknown nodes location by mobile reference node moving scheme, and will decreases the energy consumption and average location error.