Decentralized Consensus Based Target Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Target localization is an attractive subject for modern systems that utilize different types of distributed sensors for location based services such as navigation, public transport, retail services and so on. Target localization could be performed in both centralized and decentralized manner. Due to drawbacks of centralized systems such as security and reliability issues, decentralized systems are become more desirable. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized and cooperative target localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks. In cooperative consensus based localization, each sensor knows its own location and estimates the targets position using the ranging techniques such as received signal strength. Then, all nodes cooperate with their neighbours and share their information to reach a consensus on targets location. In our proposed algorithm, we weight the received information of neighbour nodes according to their estimated distance toward the target node. Simulation results confirm that our proposed algorithm is faster, less sensitive to targets location and improves the localization accuracy by 85% in comparison with distributed Gauss–Newton algorithm.