Wireless sensor networks, as an emerging paradigm of networking and computing, have applications in diverse fields such as medicine, military, environmental control, climate forecasting, surveillance, etc. For successfully tackling the node localization problem, as one of the most significant challenges in this domain, many algorithms and metaheuristics have been proposed. By analyzing available modern literature sources, it can be seen that the swarm intelligence metaheuristics have obtained significant results in this domain. Research that is presented in this paper is aimed towards achieving further improvements in solving the wireless sensor networks localization problem by employing swarm intelligence. To accomplish this goal, we have improved basic versions of the tree growth algorithm and the elephant herding optimization swarm intelligence metaheuristics and applied them to solve the wireless sensor networks localization problem. In order to determine whether the improvements are accomplished, we have conducted empirical experiments on different sizes of sensor networks ranging from 25 to 150 target nodes, for which distance measurements are corrupted by Gaussian noise. Comparative analysis with other state-of-the-art swarm intelligence algorithms that have been already tested on the same problem instance, the butterfly optimization algorithm, the particle swarm optimization algorithm, and the firefly algorithm, is conducted. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithms can obtain more consistent and accurate locations of the unknown target nodes in wireless sensor networks topology than other approaches that have been proposed in the literature.
Keywords: NP hardness; elephant herding optimization; node localization; swarm intelligence; tree growth algorithm; wireless sensor networks.