A localization strategy based on n-times trilateral centroid with weight

Localization based on received signal strength indication (RSSI) is a low cost and low complexity technology, and it is widely applied in distance-based localization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Error of existed localization technologies is significant. This paper presents the N-times trilateral centroid weighted localization algorithm (NTCWLA), which can reduce the error considerably. Considering the instability of RSSI, we use the weighted average of many RSSIs as current RSSI. To improve the accuracy we select a number of (no less than three) reliable beacon nodes to increase the localization times. Then we calculate the distances between reliable beacon nodes and the mobile node using an empirical formula. The mobile node is located N times using the trilateral centroid algorithm. Finally, we take the weighted average of the filtered reference coordinates as the mobile node’s coordinates. We conduct experiments with the STM32W108 chip which supports IEEE 802.15.4. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the trilateral centroid algorithm. Key words—Wireless sensor networks; localization; trilateral centroid; signal strength indication