Σ -Scan: A Mobile Beacon-Assisted Localization Path-Planning Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Deploying static beacons to help sensor localization is a common approach in wireless sensor network. Alternatively, adopting a mobile beacon to travel along a specific trajectory and to broadcast its locations at specific points is more efficient. Therefore, path planning of the mobile beacon originally focused on finding shortest path length and minimum broadcast points, such as Scan and Hilbert, to decrease power consumption. More recently, path planning increasingly attempted to achieve higher accuracy, such as Double-scan and Z-scan. However, optimal trade-off between power efficiency and localization accuracy is yet to be achieved. In this paper, we designed Σ -Scan which aims to reach high accuracy and coverage with short path length by combining the advantages of Scan and Z-scan. Σ -Scan provides three kinds of unit to constitute arbitrary rectangles and minimize the minimum bounding rectangle. Compared to them, Σ -Scan is more applicable, accessible and easy to implement. The simulation results show that compared to other previous approaches, Σ -Scan has the highest ratio of accuracy and coverage to path length and also decreases the incidence of collinearity in time-priority trilateration (TPT).