This work addresses the energy-based source localization problem in wireless sensors networks. Instead of circumventing the maximum likelihood (ML) problem by applying convex relaxations and approximations (like all existing approaches do), we here tackle it directly by the use of metaheuristics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that metaheuristics is applied to this type of problems. More specifically an elephant herding optimization (EHO) algorithm is applied. Through extensive simulations, the key parameters of the EHO algorithm are optimized such that they match the energy decay model between two sensor nodes. A detailed analysis of the computational complexity is presented, as well as performance comparison between the proposed algorithm and existing non-metaheuristic ones. Simulation results show that the new approach significantly outperforms the existing solutions in noisy environments, encouraging further improvement and testing of metaheuristic methods.

The present work proposes a new approach to address the energy-based acoustic localization problem. The proposed approach represents an improved version of evolutionary optimization based on Elephant Herding Optimization (EHO), where two major contributions are introduced. Firstly, instead of random initialization of elephant population, we exploit particularities of the problem at hand to develop an intelligent initialization scheme. More precisely, distance estimates obtained at each reference point are used to determine the regions in which a source is most likely to be located. Secondly, rather than letting elephants to simply wander around in their search for an update of the source location, we base their motion on a local search scheme which is found on a discrete gradient method. Such a methodology significantly accelerates the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and comes at a very low computational cost, since discretization allows us to avoid the actual gradient computations. Our simulation results show that, in terms of localization accuracy, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the standard EHO one for low noise settings and matches the performance of an existing enhanced version of EHO (EEHO). Nonetheless, the proposed scheme achieves this accuracy with significantly less number of function evaluations, which translates to greatly accelerated convergence in comparison with EHO and EEHO. Finally, it is also worth mentioning that the proposed methodology can be extended to any population-based metaheuristic method (it is not only restricted to EHO), which tackles the localization problem indirectly through distance measurements.