An Efficient Approach for Localizing Sensor Nodes in 2D Wireless Sensor Networks Using Whale Optimization-Based Naked Mole Rat Algorithm

Localization has emerged as an important and critical component of research in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSN is a network of numerous sensors distributed across broad areas of the world to conduct numerous activities, including sensing the data and transferring it to various devices. Most applications, like animal tracking, object monitoring, and innumerable resources put in the interior as well as outdoor locations, need to identify the position of the occurring incident. The primary objective of localization is to identify the locality of sensor nodes installed in a network so that the location of a particular event can be traced. Different optimization approaches are observed in the work for solving the localization challenge in WSN and assigning the apt positions to undiscovered sensor nodes. This research employs the approach of localizing sensor nodes in a 2D platform utilizing an exclusive static anchor node and virtual anchors to detect dynamic target nodes by projecting these six virtual anchors hexagonally at different orientations and then optimizing the estimated target node co-ordinates employing Whale Optimization-based Naked Mole Rat Algorithm (WONMRA). Moreover, the effectiveness of a variety of optimization strategies employed for localization is compared to the WONMRA strategy concerning localization error and the number of nodes being localized, and it has been investigated that the average error in localization is 0.1999 according to WONMRA and is less than all other optimization techniques.