Three dimensional power efficient distributed node localisation in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually used in applications in which information is only applicable when the location of informative node is known. Although the high accuracy is the main advantage of centralised algorithms, the distributed ones are more efficient in power consumption, robustness and reliability. In this paper, we first propose a three dimensional (3D) distributed node localisation algorithm for WSNs in which sensor nodes cooperate to estimate the unknown location in a distribute manner. Then, we propose a node selection algorithm extending the life time of the network. We further propose a weighting function to improve the performance of proposed algorithm. We further analyse the proposed method and prove its convergence. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithms are applicable in 3D environments while achieving acceptable performance in the case of localisation error, improving the robustness of the network and reducing the power consumption at least by 20%.