Demand-driven Movement Strategy for Moving Beacons in Distributed Sensor Localization

Abstract In a wireless sensor network, range-free localization with a moving beacon can reduce susceptibility to communication noises while concomitantly eliminate need for large number of expensive anchor nodes that are vulnerable to malicious attacks. This paper presents a moving beacon aided range-free localization technique, which is capable of estimating the location of a sensor with high accuracy. A novel distributed localization scheme is designed to optimally determine beacon movement strategy according to user demand. Superiority of this scheme to the state-of-the-art has been established in terms of location estimation quality, measured by the theoretical expected maximum error and simulated mean error while optimizing the beacon location density or traversal path length.