An Integrated Software Framework for Localization in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Devices that form a wireless sensor network (WSN) system are usually remotely deployed in large numbers in a sensing field. WSNs have enabled numerous applications, in which location awareness is usually required. Therefore, numerous localization systems are provided to assign geographic coordinates to each node in a network. In this paper, we describe and evaluate an integrated software framework WSNLS (Wireless Sensor Network Localization System) that provides tools for network nodes localization and the environment for tuning and testing various localization schemes. Simulation experiments can be performed on parallel and multi-core computers or computer clusters. The main component of the WSNLS framework is the library of solvers for calculating the geographic coordinates of nodes in a network. Our original solution implemented in WSNLS is the localization system that combines simple geometry of triangles and stochastic optimization to determine the position of nodes with unknown location in the sensing field. We describe and discuss the performance of our system due to the accuracy of location estimation and computation time. Numerical results presented in the paper confirm that our hybrid scheme gives accurate location estimates of network nodes in sensible computing time, and the WSNLS framework can be successfully used for efficient tuning and verification of different localization techniques.