Localization of WSNs Using a Location-unaware UAV

The use of mobile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to collect data from wireless sensor networks has attracted great attention recently. It is often necessary to relate the stream of sensed data to the deployed location of the data producing sensor nodes. This paper addresses the problem of localizing these nodes using a mobile UAV that is unaware of its own location. This, in contrast to existing works, does not assume a GPS equipped UAV. Each sensor node receives beacon packets transmitted by the UAV at random positions and records an RSSI vector. The L-1 norm distance of two RSSI vectors, which is theoretically proved to be linearly related to the distance between two nodes, is used for ranging. An existing location estimator is then applied to localize target nodes. Extensive simulations in different environments validate high localization accuracy of the proposed algorithm in order of few meters even under noisy channel conditions.