Swarm intelligent approaches to auto-localization of nodes in static UWB networks

In this paper, we address the problem of localizing sensor nodes in a static network, given that the positions of a few of them (denoted as “beacons“) are a priori known. We refer to this problem as “autolocalization.” Three localization techniques are considered: the two-stage maximum-likelihood (TSML) method; the plane intersection (PI) method; and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. While the first two techniques come from the communication-theoretic “world,” the last one comes from the soft computing “world.” The performance of the considered localization techniques is investigated, in a comparative way, taking into account (i) the number of beacons and (ii) the distances between beacons and nodes. Since our simulation results show that a PSO-based approach allows obtaining more accurate position estimates, in the second part of the paper we focus on this technique proposing a novel hybrid version of the PSO algorithm with improved performance. In particular, we investigate, for various popethod lane intersection (PI) method ulation sizes, the number of iterations which are needed to achieve a given error tolerance. According to our simulation results, the hybrid PSO algorithm guarantees faster convergence at a reduced computational complexity, making it attractive for dynamic localization. In more general terms, our results show that the application of soft computing techniques to communication-theoretic problems leads to interesting research perspectives. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.