Target Positioning Based on Particle Centroid Drift in Large-Scale WSNs

The localization problem of target nodes remains unresolved, especially in large-scale and complex environments. In this paper, we propose a particle centroid drift (PCD) algorithm to reduce the distance errors between nodes and obtain the particle aggregation region by using the drift vector. First, we use the particle quality prediction function to obtain the particles in a high-likelihood region. The high-quality particles have high probability in the calculation, which can increase the number of effective particles and enable avoiding particle degradation. Then, the centroid drift vector is used to make the particle distribution similar to the actual reference distribution. Experiments are conducted on state-space models: the local movement where 55% nodes are moving and the globe movement where 100% nodes are moving. The results show that the proposed algorithm has low estimation errors, a good tracking effect and an acceptable time complexity.