A Mobile Node Assisted Localization System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN), consisting of several sensor nodes, is one of the most promising technologies emerged in the past decade. The positioning system for WSN is particularly meaningful and widely used in the military surveillance, air-sea rescue, traffic monitoring, and etc. However, the traditional positioning system always suffers from deployment and maintenance of anchors. In this paper, we propose a positioning system employing a Raspberry Pi platform attached to a DJI drone as a mobile anchor. The DJI drone can serve as multiple virtual anchors by moving and broadcasting its location information periodically. Thus, it is possible to localize sensor node by itself when the sensor node collects the drone's position. A Gauss-Newton method is applied to improve the accuracy of the proposed positioning system. We also elaborate the adaption of the Gauss-Newton method with the geodetic coordinates. The goal of the proposed positioning system is to achieve higher accuracy and higher coverage at lower cost.