Designing Path Planning Algorithms for Mobile Anchor towards Range-Free Localization

Localization is one of the most important factor in wireless sensor networks as many applications demand position information of sensors. Recently there is an increasing interest on the use of mobile anchors for localizing sensors. Most of the works available in the literature either looks into the aspect of reducing path length of mobile anchor or tries to increase localization accuracy. The challenge is to design a movement strategy for a mobile anchor that reduces path length while meeting the requirements of a good range-free localization technique. In this paper we propose two cost-effective movement strategies i.e., path planning for a mobile anchor so that localization can be done using the localization scheme [10]. In one strategy we use a hexagonal movement pattern for the mobile anchor to localize all sensors inside a bounded rectangular region with lesser movement compared to the existing works in literature. In other strategy we consider a connected network in an unbounded region where the mobile anchor moves in the hexagonal pattern to localize the sensors. In this approach, we guarantee localization of all sensors within r/2 error-bound where r is the communication range of the mobile anchor and sensors. Our simulation results support theoretical results along with localization accuracy.