New Localization Technique for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks Using Sectorized Antenna

Abstract

Recently, there has been much focus on mobile sensor networks, and we have even seen the development of small-profile sensing devices that are able to control their own movement. Although it has been shown that mobility alleviates several issues relating to sensor network coverage and connectivity, many challenges remain. Among these, the need for position estimation is perhaps the most important. It is too expensive to include a GPS receiver with every sensor node. Hence, localization schemes for sensor networks typically use a small number of seed nodes that know their location and protocols whereby other sensor nodes estimate their location from the messages they receive. In this paper, we propose a new technique to localize mobile sensor nodes using sectorized antenna. We consider that both sensor nodes and seeds are mobile, and argue that mobility can be exploited to improve the accuracy and precision of localization. It is tested extensively in a simulation environment and compared with other existing methods. The results of our experiments clearly indicate that our proposed approach can achieve a high accuracy without need of high density of seeds.