Node Localization based on Anchor Placement using Fuzzy C-Means in a Wireless Sensor Network

Localization is one of the oldest mathematical and technical problems that have been at the forefront of research and development for decades. In a wireless sensor network (WSN), nodes are not able to recognize their position. To solve this problem, studies have been done on algorithms to achieve accurate estimation of nodes in WSNs. In this paper, we present an improvement of a localization algorithm namely Gaussian mixture semi-definite programming (GM-SDP-2). GMSDP is based on the received signal strength (RSS) to achieve a maximum likelihood location estimator. The improvement lies in the placement of anchors through the Fuzzy C-Means clustering method where the cluster centers represent the anchors’ positions. The simulation of the algorithm is done in Matlab and is based on two evaluation metrics, namely normalized root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and cumulative distribution function (CDF). Simulation results show that our improved algorithm achieves better performance compared to those using a predetermined placement of anchors.