Efficient Minimum Cost Area Localization for Wireless Sensor Network with a Mobile Sink

Localization has been a major research area within wireless sensor network. In a self-configuring, ad hoc wireless sensor network, it is a matter of foremost importance to have knowledge of the location of sensor nodes within a particular geographical area. This location not only helps in giving more meaning to the information gathered from sensor nodes, but also helps to achieve efficient network maintenance in case of a node or even a set of nodes´ failure within a particular area. In this paper we present a localization scheme in which a mobile sink helps in coming up with an efficient location estimation of the sensor nodes. We propose that in a small geographical network, a single steady line of motion of mobile sink is sufficient to efficiently locate the sensor nodes by discovering the topology of the network. Our localization implementation is independent of any additional hardware and achieves better efficiency as it does not depend on error-prone RSSI or AoA calculation. Simulations are conducted in NS-2 to verify our approach, the results of which highlight the minimum error induced in estimating the location of sensor nodes.