Improved DV-Hop based on Squirrel search algorithm for localization in wireless sensor networks

The ability to obtain the accurate location of nodes in wireless sensor networks is crucial for practical applications. The sensed data is meaningless if it is not accompanied by its location. Range-free localization techniques are favored to overcome the hardware limitations of sensor nodes and to avoid the costly range-based techniques. DV-Hop is a range-free localization algorithm that is well-known for its simplicity. However, it suffers from low accuracy and poor stability. In this paper, an enhanced variant of the DV-Hop algorithm is used to estimate the distance between the unknown nodes and anchor nodes, then the position estimation phase is formulated as a minimization problem solved by means of the recently developed squirrel search algorithm (SSA). The SSA is utilized to find the locations of the unknown sensor nodes. Our proposed algorithm is thus called SSIDV-Hop algorithm. The performance of our proposed algorithm is compared to that of existing localization algorithms including the DV-Hop, PSODV-Hop, GADV-Hop, and DEIDV-Hop algorithms. Extensive simulations showed that our proposed algorithm is superior to other existing algorithms as it achieved higher localization accuracy, better stability and faster convergence rate.