VirP: Virtual Points Based Localization Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Designing a scheme for facilitating sensors in a WSN to compute their own locations is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a scheme that equips sensors to estimate their own locations. In the proposed scheme, a sensor adds a set of virtual points for each location of a moving anchor. Using sets of virtual points together with actual locations of the moving anchor, it computes a convex hull. The points lying on the convex hull are used to construct an optimized circle whose center and radius is used to compute the location of the sensor iteratively. We have shown that the proposed scheme converges to the actual location of an unlocalized sensor. We observe that the localization error for the proposed scheme decreases with an increase in the number of iterations. The proposed scheme performs significantly better as compared to the existing schemes. Further, the proposed scheme provides a tradeoff between the accuracy of localization and the delay incurred during the process of localization.