DV-Hop Localization Based on Probability Distance Estimation and Expected Hop Distance Correction

Distance estimation and theoretical derivation in 3D space form the foundation basis for improving localization performance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Localization is a pivotal challenge in wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. To address this issue, we propose a probability-based distance estimation (PDE) model and a distance correction strategy based on expected hops (DCSEH). First, the PDE model is constructed from the multi-hop probability distribution of nodes, from which the upper bound and average distance for anchor nodes to detect target nodes under different hop counts are derived. Second, the DCSEH strategy effectively mitigates transmission-path detours in wireless node communication. Finally, the constructed loss function is embedded into a multi-objective genetic algorithm to predict the position of each unknown node in three-dimensional space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art 3D localization performance on both random and multimodal datasets.