Comparison of range-based versus range-free WSNs localization using adaptive SSA algorithm

In the majority of wireless sensor network applications, location information is crucial. Numerous localization techniques have been presented in recent years, the majority of them are oriented at two-dimensional applications. Whereas the challenge is more complicated in three-dimensional systems due to the broad range of altitude levels. For these purposes, two-dimensional localization models are unreliable. In this research, we use only one anchor node to identify the location of unknown sensors in a three-dimensional scenario utilizing both range-based and range-free strategies (with fuzzy logic). The middle and lower layers include sensor nodes with uncertain positions, whereas the top layer contains an anchor node. These heterogeneous mobile target nodes are deployed in an anisotropic environment having Degree of Irregularity of 0.01. The simulation results demonstrate that range-based localization techniques are significantly more efficient than range-free techniques by applying a new Adaptive SSA technique and other meta-heuristic algorithms to compute the results of range-based and range-free techniques in terms of localization error, computational time, and number of localized sensor nodes.