A Mobile-Beacon-Based Iterative Localization Mechanism in Large-Scale Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The accurate localization of nodes is one of the most basic tasks in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). However, in large-scale UASNs, nodes are difficult to be accurately located because GPS signals cannot be received and because underwater nodes cannot establish one-hop communication with beacons due to the limited transmission range. With the development of self-sinking beacon technology, in this article, we propose a mobile-beacon-based iterative localization (MBIL) mechanism to realize node hierarchically positioning of large-scale multihop UASNs with an aim at increasing the percentage of localized nodes and reducing the localization error in the network. The proposed mechanism first uses mobile beacon nodes to localize adjacent sensor nodes. Once the location information is obtained, the sensor node will calculate its confidence value to determine whether it is a qualified reference node. Then, the unknown nodes select three adjacent reference nodes with the highest evaluation index for localization, and the remaining unknown nodes are iteratively localized. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can not only achieve a higher proportion of localized nodes in a shorter time, but also effectively reduce the localization error. In addition, MBIL effectively balances the energy consumption of sensor nodes, which can prolong the network’s lifetime.