A weighted multilateration positioning method for wireless sensor networks

Localization problem is one of the most important research issues for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The purpose of this paper is to present a two‐phase localization algorithm for WSNs.

In the first phase, each sensor node obtains its initial position by DV‐hop method. In the second phase, each sensor node gathers the locations and distances to its neighbors, updates and exchanges these location information periodically and then operates the multilateration with different weight values.

The simulation result shows that the average position error of the proposed two‐phase method is less than 20 per cent of the radio range, and the number of sensor nodes which can be located is larger than 70 per cent of total nodes for a network with low density.

The paper presents a weighted multilateration positioning methods for wireless sensor networks.