Energy-Efficient RSSI-Based Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor positioning is a fundamental block in many location-dependent applications of wireless sensor networks. Although the main objective in localization is primarily enhancing the positioning accuracy, the importance of energy consumption and localization accuracy poses new challenges. The localization is usually assisted with some self-known position sensors called anchor nodes. In this letter, optimal power allocation for the anchor nodes in a sense of minimizing the energy consumption considering estimation errors is investigated. To have a better estimation of the relative distance between the anchor and unknown nodes using received signal strength indicator (RSSI), average energy of the received beacon is introduced as a new decision metric. Based on this, a squared position error bound as an accuracy parameter is derived, and an optimization problem is proposed to maximize the localization performance. More specifically, the optimal power allocation policy is first derived for the case that the anchor nodes estimate their own locations with no error. Since there are unavoidable errors in the positions of the anchor nodes, the optimization problem is then modified by including uncertainty in the positions of the anchor nodes. The results show that a substantial reduction in power consumption can be achieved by optimal allocation of the transmission power.