Enhancing 3D localization in wireless sensor network: a differential evolution method for the DV-Hop algorithm

Wireless sensor network is large-scale, self-organizing and reliable. It is widely used in the military, disaster management, environmental monitoring, and other fields. Algorithms for localization can be classified as range-based or range-free based on their ability to achieve effective localization. Range-based algorithms require hardware support, which increases deployment costs and complexity. Instead of measuring distance directly, range-free algorithms estimate the position based on hop counts between nodes. While simpler in terms of hardware requirements, this algorithm suffers from large localization errors. To address this problem, this paper proposes an improved 3D DV-Hop localization algorithm (3D DEHDV-Hop) using a differential evolutionary algorithm. First of all, theoretical analysis shows a correlation between the volume of the intersection area containing the communication range between neighbors and the number of shared single-hop nodes. Then, using the number of shared single-hop nodes between nodes, the number of hops is converted from a discrete value to an exact continuous value. Finally, the localization problem is transformed into a minimum optimization problem by incorporating a differential evolutionary algorithm. As compared to the other four algorithms compared, 3D DEHDV-Hop improves localization accuracy by an average of 10.3% under different anchor node densities, 13.7% under different communication radiuses, and 12.1% under different anchor node numbers.