Selective forwarding in DV-hop localization of wireless sensor networks

Range-free localization enables the sensor node to determine its position by using the information inside the packets from other nodes in the network. However, these sensor nodes broadcast their packet without considering energy consumption during localization phase. Moreover, none of the past works consider the unbalanced energy consumption experience by the nodes specifically near to the anchor. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm by implementing a selective forwarding during localization phase in original range-free localization algorithm named Distance Vector hop (DV-hop). In the proposed scheme, both energy and accuracy level are taken into consideration before the sensor node forwards the packet in the network. We adopted Markov Decision Process (MDP) theory for a sensor to perform selective forwarding. The results show the selective forwarding improves the average energy level, reduce the duplicated packet and did not reduce the accuracy level.