Fourth International Conference on Natural Computation
Genetic Algorithm based Wireless Sensor Network Localization
Qingguo Zhang, Jinghua Wang, Cong Jin, Junmin Ye, Changlin Ma, and Wei Zhang
Department of Computer Science
Huazhong Normal University
Wuhan 430079, China
qgzhang@mail.ccnu.edu.cn
Abstract
In most sensor network applications, the informati-
on gathered by sensors will be meaningless without the
location of the sensor nodes. Node localization has
been a topic of active research in recent years. Accur-
ate self-localization capability is highly desirable in
wireless sensor network. This paper proposes a genetic
algorithm based localization(GAL). The proposed gen-
etic algorithm adopts two new genetic operators:
single-vertex-neighborhood mutation and the descend-
based arithmetic crossover. Four example problems
are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed
algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm
can achieve higher accurate position estimation than
semi-definite programming with gradient search
localization (SDPL) [11] and simulated annealing
based localization (SAL)[13]. Compared to the usual
crossover operator: simple arithmetic crossover, whole
arithmetic crossover and single-point crossover, the
proposed crossover can obtain a lower mean position
error.
1. Introduction
The miniaturization of small devices capable of
sensing and communicating with each other has made
the possibility of deploying large-scale wireless sensor
networks with hundreds and even thousands of wirele-
ssly connected sensor and actuator nodes a reality [1].
Sensor networks have become an important technology
especially for wildlife and environmental monitoring,
military applications, disaster management, etc [2] [3].
In most sensor network applications, the information
gathered by sensors will be meaningless unless the
geographic location of the sensor nodes from where the
information is obtained is known. Consider the
example where a sensor network is used to detect a fire
event in a forest. Once a sensor node has detected that
the temperature is higher than a certain threshold, it
sends a message to the central authority by relaying
Supported by the National High Technology Research and
Development Program of China (863 Program)
(No. 2007AA01Z185) and the Natural Science Foundation
of Hubei Province(No.2007ABA119 and 2007ABA034)
978-0-7695-3304-9/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICNC.2008.206
through other nodes in a multi-hop manner. The
message needs to indicate the location of the node that
detected the event. Moreover, the location of the
sensors can be used to design efficient network routing
algorithms [4].Thus, localization of sensor nodes is
important in many applications. Theoretically, A
localization measurement device such as GPS can be
used for a sensor to locate itself. However, it is not
practical to use GPS in every sensor node because a
sensor network consists of thousands of nodes and
GPS will be very costly. On the other hand, GPS does
not work at all in indoor environments (due to the lack
of line-of-sight to the satellites), so alternative
solutions must be employed. To solve the problem,
many localization methods have been developed.
Instead of requiring every node to have GPS installed,
all localization methods assume only a few nodes(≥3)
are equipped with GPS hardware. These nodes are
often called anchor nodes and they know their
positions. Other normal sensors can communicate with
a few nearby sensors and estimate distances between
them using some localization algorithm (e.g. RSS,
ToA) and then derive their positions based on the
distances.
This paper solves the following wireless sensor
network localization problem: Given a set of sensors
distributed in the plane, and a mechanism by which a
sensor can estimate its distance to a few 1-hop
neighbors, determine the coordinates of every sensor.
We propose a genetic algorithm based localization
algorithm (GAL), and it is implemented in a
centralized architecture, where all nodes send their
measurements to a central station for localization. It is
generally true that a distributed architecture will
improve scalability and reduce complexity of the
algorithm. However, There exists a central system in
some applications such as patients monitoring and
disabled patients assisting in the health sector, bush
fire and water quality monitoring in the environment,
humidity and temperature monitoring in the precision
agriculture. The central system gathers information
608
from all nodes hop-by-hop and makes decisions
accordingly. In such applications with a centralized
architecture, it may be more convenient to implement a
centralized localization algorithm. The feasibility of
nodes sending their information to a central station has
been demonstrated in [5].
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
section 2 summarizes related work; section 3 describes
our proposed GAL approach; and section 4 gives
simulation results. We conclude this paper in section 5,
together with future work.
2. Related work
Node localization has been a topic of active research
in recent years. Accurate self-localization capability is
highly desirable in wireless sensor network. Many
researchers have approached the localization problem
from different perspectives. A detailed survey of the
area is provided by Hightower and Borriello[16]. Many
systems use some kind of range or distance
information and rely on powerful beacon nodes with
unusual capabilities, such as radio, laser ranging
devices, or directional signals. Recently, various
localization schemes have been proposed in the
literature. Niculescu and Nath [6] proposed APS posit-
ioning algorithm to extend the capabilities of GPS to
non-GPS enabled nodes in an ad hoc network. It is
simple and efficient. First, the anchors flood their
location to all nodes in the network. Then, each
unknown node performs a triangulation to three or
more anchors to estimate its position. The method
works well in dense and uniform topologies but poorly
for sparse and irregular networks. The “DV-distance”
method uses distance between neighboring nodes to
reduce the location errors, but still works poorly on
irregular networks. Savarese [7] improved Niculescu's
algorithm by introducing a refinement phase. In the
refinement phase, distance measurements between
neighbors are used to improve localization accuracy.
The refinement improves accuracy significantly, but
reduces coverage since it only works for well-
connected nodes. To prevent error accumulation,
Savvides [8] used least squares estimation with
Kalman filter to simultaneously locate the positions of
sensor nodes. The method needs more anchors to work
well than other methods. Doherty [9] approached the
problem using convex optimization based on semi-
definite programming. The connectivity of the network
is represented as a set of convex localization constrain-
ts for the optimization problem. For the method to
work well, it needs anchor nodes to be placed on the
outer boundary, preferably at the corners, to make the
constraints tight enough. When all anchors are located
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in the interior of the network, the position estimation of
outer nodes can easily collapse toward the center,
which leads to large estimation errors. Biswas [10]
extended the technique of Doherty’s work by taking
the non-convex inequality constraints and relaxed the
problem to a semi-definite program. Tzu-Chen Liang
improved Biswas's method further by a gradient search
technique [11]. Shang et al. [15] demonstrate the use of
a data analysis technique called "multidimensional
scaling" (MDS) in estimating positions of unknown
nodes. The algorithm localized an individual patch by
first computing all pairwise shortest paths between
sensors in the patch. MDS is then applied to these
distances to yield an initial layout. The patches are
“stitched” together incrementally in a greedy order by
finding the best transformation between a new patch
and the global layout. Finally, an absolute map is
obtained by using the known node positions. This
technique works well with few anchors and reasonably
high connectivity. For instance, for a connectivity level
of 12 and 2% anchors, the error is about half of the
radio range. But, unfortunately, like any other
incremental algorithm, it may accumulate error
indefinitely, especially when the pairwise distances are
significantly noisy. C. Gotsman and Y. Koren [12]
proposed a distributed positioning algorithm for
wireless sensor network based on short-range inter-
sensor distances. The algorithm involves two stages.
At the first stage the algorithm computed a Laplacian
eigenvector which typically spreads the sensors well
and obtained a fold-free layout. At the second stage it
uses the result of the first stage as an initial layout for
an iterative stress-minimization algorithm, which is
based on a majorization technique. Anushiya A
Kannan [13] adopted simulated annealing algorithm
(SAA) to locate the positions of sensor nodes in
wireless sensor work. The proposed scheme can give
accurate and consistent location estimates of the nodes.
However, the SAA is likely to be trapped by local
optima and thus obtains very poor results.
Since the localization estimation problem is an
unconstrained optimization problem (UOP) [14], it is
natural to use genetic algorithms to solve it. In this
paper, we propose a genetic algorithm based
localization (GAL) algorithm. The algorithm has the
following four advantages:
（1）The position accuracy of our algorithm is high.
（2）The method can work well not only in dense and
uniform topologies but also in sparse and irregular
networks.
（3）Our algorithm relies on no explicit communicat-
ion other than that between immediate neighbors,
which can avoids excessive communication, and also
the proposed algorithm does not propagate error in
localization.
（4）It is robust even when the measured distance
between the neighboring nodes is degraded with
Gaussian noise.
3. Genetic Algorithm Based Localization
In this section, we will present a wireless sensor
network localization algorithm based on GA. We
assume that after the network is deployed, each node
measures distances to its nearby neighbors within its
own ranging distance. After this, all of the successful
distance measurements along with the node ID are
transferred to a base station using multihop routing.
After all of the distance measurements are received at
the base station, a graph is constructed. Let us define a
graph G = (V(G), E(G)), where V(G) is the set of all
nodes in the sensor network and E(G) is the set of all
links between one-hop neighbors. If a connected
component of G, G1=(V1, E1) doesn’t have three or
more anchors, then all the sensor nodes in the subgraph
G1 are not localizable. In the rest of this paper, we
assume that each connected component of graph G
have at least three anchors.
Consider a sensor network with m anchor nodes
whose locations are known and n-m unknown sensor
nodes whose locations are unknown, Suppose that
(xi,yi),i=m+1,…,n represent the estimated coordinates
of node i in the plane, n is the number of sensor nodes,
d ij = ( xi − x j ) 2 + ( y i − y j ) 2 is the Euclidean
distance between node i and node j in a candidate
solution, lij is the measured distance of node i and its 1-
hop neighbor j, and Ni represent the set of all 1-hop
neighbors of node i. In our simulated experiments, all
the sensor nodes are placed in a square region, so we
add the following constraints:
a≤xi, yi≤b
The localization problem can be formulated as:
n ExpVal (i ) = ⎧⎨1 + ( f (i) − f (t )) / 2σ (t ) , if σ (t ) > 0. (4)
Min ∑ ∑ (d
( xi , yi ) i = m +1 j∈N i
ij − lij ) 2
m<i ≤ n
The objective function shown in (1) represents the
quantitative measure of the "goodness" of the
coordinate estimate. Our aim is to optimize the fitness
function using genetic algorithm to get the optimal
location estimate.
The two genetic operators adopted in our genetic
algorithm are described as below:
The single-vertex-neighborhood mutation operator-
choose a random vertex and move it to a random point
in the circle of decreasing radius around the vertex’s
original location. Suppose that vertex vi(xi,yi) is chosen
for mutation, then the new coordinates ( x i′ , y i′ ) of vi
are defined as follows:
⎧ xi′ = xi + r cos θ
⎨ (2)
⎩ y i′ = y i + r sin θ
where radius r=ideal_distance*(1-t/T); ideal_distance=
s / n is the desired distance between 1-hop
neighbors, s=(b-a)2 is the area of the square region in
the plane, n is number of sensor nodes, t is the current
generation number, T is the maximum number of
generations; θ ∈ [0, 2 π ] is an angle randomly
produced; As can be seen, the radius r is decreasing as
the algorithm proceeds.
The descend-based arithmetic crossover operator-
basically, the whole population of chromosomes
ranked in descending order according to their objective
values. The crossover operator looks for any
opportunistic improvement between any pair of
chromosomes sequentially extracted from the sorted
list of chromosomes. In this regard, we usually set the
population size to be even. Otherwise, the last pair can
simply be formed from the last and first chromosomes
of the sorted list. For each pair (i, i + 1) of
chromosomes, the crossover operator will proceed to
perform an arithmetic crossover. C i
gen gen
and C i +1 may
gen +1 gen +1
produce two offspring, C i and C i +1 , which is a
linear combination of their parents i.e.,
C igen +1 = aC igen + (1 − a)C igen
+1 (3)
C gen +1
= aC gen
+ (1 − a)C gen
i +1 i +1 i
Where a is a random number in range of [0,1].
In order to avoid premature convergence, we
perform a sigma proportional transformation on each
individual’s fitness value [17], i.e., for the fitness value
f(i) of the i-th individual, at first we apply the
following formula to f(i) to transform it into ExpVal(i):
(1)
⎩1,
Where f(t) is the average fitness value of the t-th
if σ (t )＝0.
generation population, and σ (t ) is the standard
deviation of the t-th generation population. After such
transformation, the algorithm then uses elitist fitness
proportionate selection mechanism for ExpVal(i) to
select chromosomes for reproduction. The best
individual in the population is always passed on
unchanged to the next generation, without undergoing
crossover or mutation.
The termination condition of our GA is just a check
whether the algorithm has run for a fixed number of
generations.
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 In our simulations, we notice that the position
4. Experimental results estimation errors are changed when the anchors are
placed at different positions. For good performance, we
We have implemented our algorithm in Borland recommend to have at least one anchor node placed on
Delphi 6.0. The algorithm was simulated on a PC with each wing of the C-shaped topology and one anchor
Celeron 1.7 GHz processor, 384MB RAM. The node placed near the corner of the grid topology.
experimental parameters values are shown as table 1. In the four topologies, we vary the average
Table 1. The parameters value of experiment connectivity levels (i.e., average number of one-hop
Parameters Parameters value
neighbors per node) and the number of anchors in the
area. The average connectivity levels are controlled by
Population size 20 specifying the transmission range R. A relationship of
Generation count 1000 transmission range vs. connectivity is tabulated in
Crossover probability 0.75 Table 2. The transmission range R is normalized by the
placement unit length r.
Mutation probability 0.85
Table 2. Transmission range vs. the connectivity
We evaluate the performance of the proposed Transmission Range 1.1 1.3 1.5 1.7 1.9 2.0
algorithm by using the same topology as in [15]. Four
different topologies are considered as the sensor (a) 3.6 3.7 6.7 6.8 7.5 8.0
network’s coverage area. Two have uniform topologies Ave (b) 3.3 3.4 6.0 6.1 6.8 7.3
and the other two have irregular topologies. They are Connectivity (c) 8.3 11.1 14.7 18.1 22.3 24.4
shown in Fig. 1: (a) uniform grid, 100 nodes placed (d) 9.3 12.2 15.7 19.2 22.7 24.4
according to a 10r × 10r grid, (b) irregular grid, 79 To model the errors in distance measuring, we add
nodes placed according to a C-shaped grid within a 10r Gaussian noise to the distance between the neighboring
nodes. The measured distance between the neighboring
×10r square. (c) uniform random, 200 nodes randomly nodes, which is used in the fitness function, is
degraded by introducing a Gaussian noise into the true
distance as shown in (5).
l ij = lijt (1.0 + Gaussian Noise ()* Noise Factor) (5)
Where l ijt and l ij are the true distance and the
measured distance respectively between the two nodes
i and j. In our simulations noise factor is taken as 10%.
The Gaussian noise has a mean of 0 and a standard
(a) (b) deviation of 1.
We measure the performance of the algorithm
with mean location error in (6). It is reported in
percentage, normalized by the transmission range.
n

(c) (d)
Figure 1. Four example problems
placed inside a 10r × 10r square, where r=1 is the
placement unit length, and (d) irregular random, 160
nodes randomly placed inside an C-shaped area within
a 10r × 10r square. In the figures, circles represent
sensor nodes and edges represent connections between
nodes that are within communication range of each
other.
∑ (( x t
i − xi ) 2 + ( y it − y i ) 2 )
(6)
mean location error= i = m +1 2
( n − m) R
Where ( xi , y i ) is the estimated location of sensor
t t
node and ( x i , y i ) is the true location of sensor node.
R is the transmission range. A low error means good
performance of the evaluated method.
Fig.2 shows the results of our algorithm on the four
example problems with 10% anchor nodes and
transmission range of 1.8. The green rectangles
represent the anchor nodes. The circles represent the
estimated locations of the nodes and the solid lines
represent the errors of the estimated positions from the
true positions. The longer the line, the larger the error

611
is. The mean square error of the four problems is 1%，
1%，2% and 2%, respectively.
(a) (b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 2. Results of our algorithm on the four
example problems with 10% Anchor &
Transmission range of 1.8
We compare our proposed GAL algorithm with
semi-definite programming with gradient search
localization (SDPL) [11] and simulated annealing
based localization (SAL)[13]. The results are shown in
Fig.3. It shows the position estimation errors as a func-
tion of the transmission range by the three methods on
Figure 3. Location error of uniform random networks
uniform random networks(i.e., Fig.1c) with 5% and
10% random anchor nodes. For each point in Fig.3, 30
simulations are performed and the average error is sho-
wn. As shown in Fig.3, the proposed GAL algorithm
performs much better than SDPL and SAL.
Because the performance of genetic algorithms
depends on the choice of crossover and mutation
operators, we compare the performance of the descend-
612
based arithmetic crossover (DBAC) operator against
that of the simple arithmetic crossover (SAC) operator,
whole arithmetic crossover (WAC) operator and
single-point crossover (SPC) operator on the four
example problems. For each crossover operator, we run
the genetic algorithm 50 times on each of the four
example problems with 10% anchor nodes and
transmission range of 1.8. The average location error is
shown in table 3. Obviously, our proposed crossover
operator can achieve a lower mean position error than
the other three crossover operators.
Table 3. Comparison of the various crossover
operators
Topology DBAC SAC WAC SPC
uniform grid 1% 9% 5% 25%
irregular grid 1% 9% 5% 26%
uniform random 2% 12% 7% 30%
irregular random 2% 13% 8% 35%
5. Conclusion and future work
In this paper we presented a genetic algorithm
based localization algorithm. It is implemented in a
centralized architecture. The proposed genetic
algorithm adopts two new genetic operators: single-
vertex-neighborhood mutation and the descend-based
arithmetic crossover. Four example problems are used
to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Simulation results show that our algorithm can achieve
higher accurate position estimation than semi-definite
programming with gradient search localization (SDPL)
[11] and simulated annealing based localization (SAL)
[13]. Compared to the usual crossover operator: simple
arithmetic crossover, whole arithmetic crossover and
single-point crossover, the proposed crossover can
obtain a lower mean position error. It was also shown
that the proposed algorithm does not propagate error in
localization. Further work is to investigate implement-
ation of the proposed algorithm in a distributed
architecture.
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