H-FCD: Hybrid Fuzzy Centroid and DV-Hop Localization Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

A variety of applications for wireless sensor network technology have become practical and available including environment, healthcare, civil, and military, leading to greater interest in both the research and industrial community. Despite several distinctive features, i.e., tiny size and portable, embedded various sensing capability, and cost-effectiveness, among routing and reliability, localization is one of the key challenges. Due to the cost and limitation of additional hardware nodes, a range-free localization scheme based on the absolute point-to-point distance estimation, is promising and is being pursued as a cost-effective approach. Thus, we propose a novel hybrid localization algorithm utilizing distinctive characteristics of centroid-based and DV-Hop-based approaches with a heterogeneous number of reference nodes. In addition, an extra weight derived from a fuzzy logic function using signal intensity is employed. These combinations are Hybrid Fuzzy Centroid and DV-Hop Localization leading to outstanding performance in terms of location error reduction when compared to other state-of-the-art range-free localization schemes.