A Spherical Band-based DV-Hop localization technique for three-dimensional wireless sensor network

Wireless Sensor Networks have been the focal point of research for many years due to their wide range of application areas. Such networks consist of resource-constrained sensor nodes that are generally not equipped with any positioning component due to cost issues. This requires the adoption of suitable methodologies to infer the location of the deployed sensor nodes. Location information of such sensor nodes can be obtained with the help of some location-aware nodes. Numerous localization algorithms exist in the literature. Amongst them, Distance Vector Hop (DV-Hop) is a computationally less expensive algorithm that uses hop count values between sensor nodes and anchor nodes for location estimation of the deployed sensor nodes. However, the traditional DV-Hop algorithm produces a larger positioning deviation for a higher hop count value. Several existing works attempt to address this issue by either modifying the hop size or optimizing the estimated position resulting in comparatively higher localization errors and computationally expensive. This paper aims to solve the issue by modifying the hop size by dividing it into equal-sized spherical bands (SB). Sensor nodes use this SB value for computing their distances from anchor nodes and non-coplanar anchor nodes for location estimation. The simulation results demonstrate that the mean localization error of the proposed approach has reduced approximately by 75%, 66%, and 47% in comparison to traditional DV-Hop, 3D PSODV-Hop, and 3D GAIDV-Hop respectively.