Adaptive Mobile Anchor Localization Algorithm Based on Ant Colony Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), node’s locations play a critical role in many applications. Having a GPS receiver on every sensor node is costly. In this paper, we propose an adaptive mobile anchor localization algorithm based on ant colony optimization , firstly, some virtual anchor nodes are distributed in the area, second, ant colony was used which has the maximum of transition probabilities to obtain the optimal path, last, the centroid-weighted localization algorithm was proposed to locate the position of unknown nodes. Simulation results show that the localization accuracy of the proposed algorithm is better than the traditional centroid algorithm, the more number of anchor nodes, namely, the density is bigger, the position errors is smaller. Under the same anchor nodes, the more number of unknown nodes, the position errors is smaller and the overall trend is downward.