Improving node localization in WSN by using obstruction level indicator

Wireless sensor networks can be used in habitat monitoring for detecting fire, in disaster for helping rescue teams and in agriculture for sensing humidity. Node localization is essential for some important sensor network applications. Despite the high relative accuracy of some localization algorithms, node localization is still an opened research area, due to the physical phenomena such as attenuation, reflection, diffraction, scattering and so forth. The current developed algorithms have different accuracy when are tested under dissimilar environments. We propose to use Smart Beacon Nodes (SBNs) to infer the Obstruction Level Indicator over an occupied area, then, use this indicator for estimating the distance among nodes. In our experimental simulation, SBNs decrease the node localization error of Triangular Centroid Localization and Weighted Centroid Localization up to 18%.