A particle swarm optimization approach for the localization of a wireless sensor network

For many wireless sensor network applications, the localization of sensor nodes is an essential requirement. In this paper, a low cost localization system based on the measurements from a pedometer and communication ranging between neighboring nodes is presented. Unlike most of the existing methods that require good network connectivity, the proposed system works well in a sparse network. The localization information is obtained through a probability based algorithm that requires the solving of a nonlinear optimization problem. To obtain the optimum location of the sensor nodes, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) scheme that can be realized with a microcontroller for real time application is investigated in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields good performance.