Probabilistic Support Vector Machine Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks play an important role in making the dream of ubiquitous computing a reality. With a variety of applications, sensor networks have the potential to influence everyone's life in the near future. However, there are a number of issues in deployment and exploitation of these networks that must be dealt with for sensor network applications to realize such potential. Localization of the sensor nodes, which is the subject of this paper, is one of the basic problems that must be solved for sensor networks to be effectively used. This paper proposes a probabilistic support vector machine (SVM)-based method to gain a fairly accurate localization of sensor nodes. As opposed to many existing methods, our method assumes almost no extra equipment on the sensor nodes. Our experiments demonstrate that the probabilistic SVM method (PSVM) provides a significant improvement over existing localization methods, particularly in sparse networks and rough environments. In addition, a post processing step for PSVM, called attractive/repulsive potential field localization, is proposed, which provides even more improvement on the accuracy of the sensor node locations.